THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Mark Harris
On a bright day in June 2019, a 22-year-old woman in Dallas, Texas, decided to film herself trying kombucha for the first time. Sipping it, she pulled her face in disgust, rapidly reconsidered, then changed her mind again, before accepting the confusing allure of kombucha with a honking laugh. We know this, because she posted her reaction onto the video-sharing app TikTok. The bizarrely funny and compulsively re-watchable moment spread across the internet instantaneously – and launched the comedic career of its creator, Ms Brittany Broski, who now has more than seven million followers on the app.
For many, the wild spread of Broski’s video was the first time that they had encountered the sort of content found on TikTok outside of the (often cringey) dancing videos that helped it become so popular. Since then, the Chinese-owned video-based social media app has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. With more than a billion monthly active users – a number expected to almost double by the end of 2022 – it is one of the most rapidly growing platforms on the internet.
That’s despite constant challenges. In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an investigation into how TikTok handled its users’ data. Former US president Mr Donald Trump wanted to ban the app and, most recently, a Federal Communications Committee commissioner has requested that Apple and Google remove TikTok from their app stores over concerns that TikTok employees were accessing the data of American users.
Nevertheless, TikTok continues to grow. So far, at least in the popular imagination, it has been the territory of Gen Z, who have left Instagram and the now-ancient Facebook behind. Thanks in part to the boredom inspired by the pandemic, TikTok’s user base is diversifying. As of this year, 39 per cent of millennials are now on the app, while Gen Xers are a rapidly rising segment.
As TikTok’s audience has broadened, so has its content. You can still find dancing, but it has become a sprawling mass of niche-interest videos. No matter what you’re interested in, from gardening to communism, there is a TikTok out there for you. In fact, the app’s algorithm is so advanced that it knows what you’re into before you do – a fact that’s quite terrifying if you think about it for too long.
Where TikTok has truly blossomed is comedy. Like Vine, the short-lived but impactful video app that came before it, TikTok is rapidly spawning its own in-jokes, reference points and its own roster of rapidly ascending comedic stars.
“TikTok is so different to any other social media platform out there right now. You see so many different types of people of all ethnicities and sexualities – there’s an audience for everything”
What often sets the app apart is how its users approach the content they’re sharing. Compare it to the highly curated world of Instagram, filled with the aspirational artificiality perpetuated by a saturation of the influencer aesthetic (perfectly groomed individuals, all good-looking, all wealthy). Such homogeneity and inauthenticity sit at odds with the sort of content gaining traction on TikTok, where slightly weirder individuals are celebrated.
“TikTok is so different to any other social media platform out there right now,” says Ms Maddie Grace Jepson, a comedian and TikToker who has more than 945,000 followers on the app. “The fact that you see so many different types of people of all ethnicities and sexualities means there’s an audience for everything. And I think a big reason I love TikTok so much is that I see normal people being funny – people I would never probably meet in real life.”
Like many, Jepson began experimenting with TikTok during lockdown. Initially, her videos were fairly innocuous – clips of her dog interspersed with attempts at different social media trends. It was the latter that saw her account blow up, after she posted a clip of her swinging her arm and lip-syncing to a particularly colourfully worded sound clip, taken from a recording of another of the platform’s users.
If the appeal of that makes no sense to you, you’re not alone. Like the meme culture that birthed it, much of the platform’s humour has to be seen to be understood. The jokes are often abstract, surreal, self-referential, unintentional and odd. They are often filled, too, with in-jokes for the digital generation, which are likely to sail over the heads of all but the terminally online. Often, the videos themselves then spawn their own in-jokes, which are quickly picked up by other users and spread across the internet at rapid speed.
Jepson has experienced this herself when a sound she recorded for a video went viral. The clip in question, which mocks the commodification and overutilisation of language typically used by LGBTQIA+ and Black communities, is, admittedly, kind of stupid. But the sound has been used more than 3,200 times, including by Gen Z icons from musician Charli XCX to Ms Addison Rae, an influencer with 88.1 million followers on the app. “That sound is so funny to me because it came from a place where I felt pressure to post something,” Jepson says. “It wasn’t scripted. I don’t even know what made me do it. It just happens.”
“The punchline has to come much quicker. You also have the time to edit your videos and ask people whether they like it or not”
Comedian Ms Elsa Majimbo, who is originally from Kenya but now lives in Los Angeles, also takes this laissez-faire approach to her videos. Known for her monologues about the cost of living and various inequalities, her clips almost always see her leaning back on a pillow, munching crisps and donning tiny 1990s sunglasses. Their anticlimactic, bathetic humour of her videos is the point. They build up, brilliantly, into nothing. “To be honest, I’m not much of a planner, so I just do things that feel right and go with the flow,” she says of her approach. “If the idea comes, it does. If it doesn’t, I don’t stress about it. I just go about my day.”
The secret to success as a social media comedian is swiftness. “The punchline has to come much quicker,” says Majimbo. “You also have the time to edit [your videos] and ask people whether they like it or not.”
Not every TikToker takes such an impulsive approach to their comedy. Mr Nicholas Flannery has made a name for himself on the platform with his sketches that ape TV shows such as Big Little Lies, Desperate Housewives and Selling Sunset, all of which involve some planning. “I have a list of four or five things and start to script them and give myself stage directions,” he says.
What prevents the videos from just becoming another set of skits, however, is how they eschew any sense of glossy sheen in favour of something more lo-fi. “I think people are looking for that kind of ridiculousness and a bit of a foot off the gas in terms of not having such a polished version of humour, but a ridiculous sense of humour,” he adds.
Flannery also points to the culture wars currently being played out in the world of comedy as an explanation for the proliferation of absurdist TikTok humour. “I wouldn’t say comedy is in crisis,” he says, “but there’s definitely more political correctness going on. For example, I’m gay, so I can make fun of gay people. But people don’t want comedians to cross those boundaries and I agree with them.”
“I saw a video with six million likes that just featured a man who had duct taped spaghetti to his head and was hitting it against a wall until the spaghetti was gone”
Note the furore surrounding recent Netflix specials by comedians such as Messrs Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, both of which included material that was widely criticised as transphobic. Some now see traditional media as the province of lazy, offensive and discriminatory comedy. On TikTok, they can not only find people just like themselves, but the platform can make a star out of those individuals, too.
And yet many stars born from the app are using their newfound celebrity to move into television. You need only look at the success of British-Zimbabwean comedian Mr Munya Chawawa, who rose to fame with his social media videos and now regularly appears on TV, and comedian Mr Benito Skinner, whose impressions of Ms Britney Spears and Mr Shawn Mendes landed him a role in the upcoming Queer As Folk reboot.
“I do think that the irreverent comedy of social media will make its way into the mainstream because things change and every day there are more and more people catching up and saying they love it,” says Majimbo, who is currently developing her own projects in Los Angeles. “But I hope it doesn’t take over the kind of traditional style of comedy because it’s precious and definitely needs to be preserved.”
But even if mainstream media decides to take a bigger bite out of TikTok comedy, the platform’s rapid evolution will make it hard for it to keep up. “I saw a video with something with six million likes that just featured a man who had duct taped spaghetti to his head and was hitting it against a wall until the spaghetti was gone,” says Flannery. “I think that’s the whole point of TikTok. You can be whoever you are and just put a video out and it will resonate with lots and lots of people.”
Of course, if that doesn’t sound like your sort of thing, there will undoubtedly be something on TikTok that does work for you. “Get on it and have a look for yourself,” says Jepson. “I’d say you’d be surprised. There are people of all ages, all ethnicities, sexualities, all genres, everything on there. You can’t make a judgment if you don’t know.”