'Texts from Bennett' was fake, as anyone with a brain could have realized (UPDATED)

You can't trust anything on the Internet this week! First, the hilarious story of a jerkbag who ostensibly permanently tattooed poop on his cheating girlfriend's back was debunked and now Texts From Bennet, the hilarious tumblr blog all your lamestream friends were tweeting about yesterday, has been revealed as a fake.

As the Smoking Gun reports:

Those hilarious “Texts From Bennett” that this week took the Internet by storm are not, in fact, written by a dopey 17-year-old who works at an Amoco station and fashions himself a Midwest Crip.

“Bennett” is the creation of David Sheldon, the 30-year-old Kansas rapper known as Mac Lethal...While Sheldon has said that “Bennett” actually exists and the texts are “100% real,” the rapper’s own father today directly contradicted those claims.

Asked by TSG if his son had a 17-year-old cousin named Bennett, Sheldon’s father, also named David, laughed and said, “That’s what he says.” ... “Mac writes them,” [the father] said, “and puts it in the form of texts.”

(If you shared Texts from Bennet, time to delete it from your feed immediately, before the story gets out.)

Of course, if you spent some time thinking about these sort of things, it was pretty clear that Texts from Bennet was fishy, for the following three reasons:

1: Bennett was too perfect. The American education system is fairly crappy, yes. But few people are that consistently dumb all the time in real life unless they're trying to be on purpose. And the people that are, are rarely dumb in such a perfectly viral way. What sort of person knows enough about Vincent Van Gogh to know that he chopped his ear off, but not enough to know that he's not the same person as Vince Vaughn?

2: "Bennett's cousin" was also too perfect. Take a look at the responses to Bennett. The "cousin" is always repeating Bennet's jokes for the benefit of the audience, or asking leading questions to set up more punchlines. It reads like the dialogue of a classic straight man in a crappy sitcom -- which, in essence, it is.

3: Fake iPhone screenshots. If there's one joke-telling medium you cannot trust the veracity of, it's fake iPhone screenshots. Too often are they used to dress up a mediocre joke (or in this case, a crappily sketched "character") with a veneer of "Whoa, this really happened!" verisimilitude.

So, the next time someone sends you a "totally hilarious" viral web site, remember: Be skeptical! Your entire reputation is at stake!

UPDATE: We've talked to Mac Lethal, who says that the blog is 100% real, he just doesn't want to sell out his family to confirm it. Do we have egg on our faces? You decide!