Comedy’s Greatest Hits

Six months ago Matt Lacey was like most struggling actors. Fresh out of Oxford, he had spent a year fruitlessly trailing auditions. Then, in a bid to boost his profile, Lacey and his comedy troupe The Unexpected Items put a sketch on YouTube entitled Gap Yah. A clever, if not particularly subtle, satire of the over-privileged students Lacey met at Oxford, the sketch follows excruciating rah Orlando as he recounts gap year stories to his friend Tarquin. After much "spiritual-cultural-political enlightenment" each of Orlando’s adventures promptly culminate with him "chundering everywhere" after a "night on the lash".

For a couple of weeks Gap Yah sat inconspicuously on YouTube, generating only a few hundred views. But then one day Lacey noticed something peculiar happening.

“I remember it was a Monday morning and I saw the clip had reached 1,000 views and I thought ‘wow, that’s not bad’. By the end of the day, it was on 40,000,” he says.

Gap Yah quickly became a YouTube sensation. Within two weeks 500,000 people had seen the video and, incredibly, its viewing figures now stand at nearly two million. The video has also spawned its own T-shirts, a YouTube techno remix and this August will culminate in Lacey and The Unexpected Items bringing an hour of sketch comedy to the Fringe.

But why has Gap Yah been so spectacularly popular? “I think it just parodies a stereotype that almost everyone recognises – and has probably been annoyed by,” Lacey says. “In particular it's a satire on the great number of people who seem to be leaving these shores to vomit all over the developing world.”

To those who follow internet comedy, the success of Gap Yah is nothing extraordinary. Over the last few years the internet has created a new breed of British comedian. From the musical parody of Midnight Beast to the prolific comedy filmmakers Cassette Boy, Cyriak and Worm Hotel, DIY web comedy has slowly begun to change the shape of the British comedy field.

The model of the "internet comedy star" arguably follows the example set by American comic Bo Burnham, who also makes his Fringe debut this year. In fact, the trajectory of Burnham’s success was not dissimilar to Lacey’s. Burnham was just 16 when school friends convinced him to post his eerie and subversive song 'My Whole Family (Thinks I’m Gay)' on YouTube in 2006. After lying dormant for weeks, the video was picked up by an American college website and overnight received a million hits.

“It was a little scary,” Burnham admits. “A bit surreal, a bit extra-terrestrial.”

Burnham’s videos have a distinctive aesthetic, featuring him alone in his bedroom, accompanying himself on the electric piano and rarely changing expression or camera angle. The effect is deliberate, creating a strange, intimate and slightly disturbing atmosphere central to the comedy.

“I think with my videos there’s an element of voyeurism, it feels like you’re looking into this person’s life,” Burnham says. “Online people don’t want to see things that are professional quality, they don’t want to see beautiful people, so keeping it raw was a smart idea.”

Burnham’s array of comedy videos now have a staggering 60 million views, but the nature of the internet means these figures still only represent a “niche college audience,” he says. Examining the demographics of those watching Gap Yah, it seems Lacey has a similarly select audience.

“It's being watched in places like Botswana and Mongolia, and I very much suspect the native Mongols are laughing at someone ‘chundering everywhere'. It must be people on their gap year,” he says.

One of the main strengths of internet comedy, according to Lacey, is that it is much more democratic than most TV comedy, cutting out the endless layers of production that dictate what we eventually see on our screens.

“I think there’s something quite pure about it. I mean you put a video of yourself talking into a camera and 1.9 million people watch it. I mean TV and radio ratings are such horseshit, they’re usually compiled from some ‘special’ audience, whereas YouTube is actually a much more accurate gauge of what people like,” he says.

But not all those involved in internet comedy agree. According to comedy producer John Petrie, just because a comedy video boasts millions of views, this does not necessarily make it good. “A lot of the clips that get millions of hits online tend to be cats falling off walls and other You’ve Been Framed-type stuff,” he says.

The golden rule for online comedy: it's got to hook you in quick. According to Burnham’s mantra, it has to provide a hit within the first 30 seconds otherwise people get bored. But the difficulty is that this often rules out slower, more subtle material. At its worse online comedy becomes what Burnham describes as - “comedy for people with attention-deficiency disorder.”

The problem, according to Petrie, is that although there is lots of brilliant comedy being made online, most people don’t ever see it because it’s buried beneath so many “dogs on roller-skates and dads being hit in the face with footballs”.

In an attempt to find the comic gems in this pile of inanity, Petrie and comedian Holly Walsh set up Popcorn Comedy at last year’s Fringe, a comedy night which now runs across the country.

The idea behind the project is simple but surprisingly effective. Petrie and Walsh act as a kind of quality control team, scouring the web for the sharpest comedy and then showcasing the best via a full size cinema screen.

“We’re kind of doing the hard job for you, using our time to save you sifting through endless clips,” he says.

Petrie argues the main advantage of Popcorn Comedy is that it allows people to enjoy the artistry of internet comedy in a live environment rather than fleetingly on the go.

“You only get a true sense of whether something’s funny when it’s in front of an audience. With internet comedy you tend to watch it on your laptop, or on your lunch break. But if you look at some of the funniest clips we show at Popcorn Comedy they’ve got really low view counts. That’s because they take a bit of effort to watch. You need to concentrate.”

As for Gap Yah, Lacey agrees that success in the comedy industry still depends largely on live performance. Despite a few meetings with TV producers, he says he’s still “wondering how to turn points into prizes” in terms of his career. “It’s like having all the trappings of fame without the money or the TV show,” he says.

For now Lacey says he’s hoping the Fringe will provide the platform to build on Gap Yah’s success. “It’s difficult at Edinburgh because there’s so many sketch shows saying ‘come and see us, we’re the best ones.’ But hopefully this year when audiences say why, we’ll be able to say, well, because you’ve already seen us.”