Social media has become a viable alternative to live gigging as a route to comedy stardom. But can viral success ever be a true substitute for hard graft on the circuit?
“You know, I think I might be famous in Pakistan,” says standup comedian Finlay Christie. In 2019, Christie became the youngest winner of So You Think You’re Funny? and now, at just 22, is honing OK Zoomer, his first hour-long set ahead of the Edinburgh festival fringe. But people in Pakistan don’t know Christie through his award-winning standup, and that’s not how I came across him either. I first saw his sketches on TikTok, the social media platform that has become a shop window for British comedians, and where he’s racked up 174k followers and counting.
Content on the platform primarily takes the form of 15- to 60-second videos: hardly enough time to deliver a proper routine, but more than enough for a video sending up everything from the corniness of 90s sitcoms to the emetic tone British ads adopted in the pandemic. (“For all the zeros and NHS heroes – Britain, here’s one for you.”) This simple formula bears little relation to traditional standup comedy, but it has worked wonders for Christie: “My videos spread to other platforms without me knowing,” he says. “One got posted on Reddit, and Al Jazeera got in touch asking if they could show it.”
