Upcoming young British comedians

Immensely shareable, funny and original, there are numerous young comedians in the UK gaining exposure and popularity on YouTube. Many of their sketches are quintessentially British.

If you are familiar with the term ‘rah’ (if you aren’t, check out the definition of 'rah' in the Urban Dictionary) then you will probably appreciate Gap Yah. With a massive 2m views, it’s a take on the irritating tendency of some privileged students to reference their gap year. It begins with our Rah telling his friend Tarquin that he can’t go shopping on the King’s Road that day as he’s LITERALLY in Burma.



‘Gap Yah’ was created by The Unexpected Items, a member of whom co-wrote the massive viral parody Newport Ymerodraeth State of Mind (after Jay-Z and Alicia Key’s Empire State of Mind).

There are countless tributes to the Gap Yah sketch uploaded by young YouTube users and you can even buy the official Gap Yah single on itunes. So if you suddenly start noticing people saying “BANTER! Amazing... just like Fulham!” or “VOMCANO!” you know why. The sequel, Gap Yah 2: Afterparty is equally entertaining: “I was Lash Gordon, eating bangers and lash on the LASHional front! I was LITERALLY wearing a lashmina. I was withdrawing lash from the lash machine!”

Returning to the privileged student theme, High Renaissance Man is a ‘sad tale of failure and betrayal’. It documents the escapades of the hapless and hilariously try-hard James as he attempts to impress his peers at Bristol University. Created by a genuine History of Art student at Bristol uni, the 4-part mini-series is an accurate caricature of red-brick studentdom filled with profound academic insights such as “all art before 1900 is f*cking old.”



Privileged students are by no means the only targets for unforgiving parody. Being a d*ckhead’s cool is a song about self-styled British hipsters. Uploaded on the 9th of September, it achieved nearly 2m views in less than a week.

If gap yahs, artistic analysis and mocking hipsters aren’t high-brow enough for you, perhaps we should consider literature instead… or rather, Jane Austen’s Fight Club. Lizzie and co discover the illicit thrill of violence, 18th-century style. In their words; “we were no longer good society.” We’re laughing, and Jane Austen is turning in her grave.



So what does this mean for brands?

Whilst many brands align themselves with music to attract a younger audience, humour is undeniably the backbone of the majority of YouTube’s successful virals. The new breed of self-styled YouTube comedians capitalises on this and provides a newer, mass market and relatively untapped opportunity for brands looking to align themselves in a relevant way with youth culture both online and offline. The digital space has been a fertile hunting ground for music talent ever since the Arctic Monkeys rose to prominence on MySpace in 2005, but it is now proving equally so for comedic talent who have huge resonance with a wide audience.