Why YouTube Comedy Stopped Being Funny (And Then Got Funny Again, Quietly, In Places You Weren't Looking)
The first wave of YouTube comedy was an accident. Bedroom kids with cameras, no broadcast standards to please, no ad agency to pacify. The format was: be weird, be cheap, be fast. Some of it was unwatchable. Some of it was Filthy Frank. Some of it was a slow-motion 2010s migration of Vine refugees who learned that six seconds had been training them, all along, for something they didn't yet have a name for.
Then the algorithm arrived, and the algorithm has no sense of humour. It can detect what you watch but not why you laughed, so it optimised for the next-most-watchable thing — slightly longer, slightly smoother, slightly more thumbnail-able. Compounded over a decade, this is how you get a generation of comedians whose every video begins with the same energetic in-camera apology for the sponsor read, and whose every joke has been pre-tested by the brain's internal "will this get us demonetised" subroutine before it reaches the lips.
So when we sat down to commission this issue, the first question was simple: is YouTube comedy any good now? And the second question — the real one — was: if it is, where?
YouTube comedy didn't die. It just stopped being concentrated in the obvious places. The funny people are still there — they're just running stunts at Bass Pro Shops, building four-hour theme-park requiems, and operating outside the English-language algorithm entirely.
This issue is our attempt to map what survived. Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez face off in the Boss Fight — best friends, parallel careers, near-identical formats, completely different voices, and a question that has nagged us since 2019 about which one is actually better. Jenny Nicholson gets her overdue ESSENTIAL — yes, it's the Star Wars hotel video, but it's also six other things, and we'll explain. Ryan George has been making the same Pitch Meeting joke for half a decade and we're going to argue that this is, in fact, comedy's hardest trick. Eddy Burback ate at every Olive Garden in America and the result is somehow profound. Porta dos Fundos became the first non-English comedy channel we've ever profiled — fulfilling the commitment we made to Marco T. last issue, and embarrassing ourselves only slightly that it took until #014.
Time Capsule is an embarrassment of riches this month. Gilda Radner reacts to the SNL clip economy and the parasocial intimacy of solo creators — a question her own career was built on the wrong end of. Chris Farley sees what a thumbnail does to a face and gets quieter than we expected. Sam Kinison, a former Pentecostal preacher who became a stand-up comic and died in 1992, is invited to consider the offence economy and the algorithm's quiet moralism — the result is the most unsettling interview we've published. Truman Capote watches three influencer apology videos and reaches a conclusion that should be carved on a wall somewhere. Ernest Hemingway is given Drew Gooden's deadpan and identifies the iceberg theory underneath. And Lucille Ball — the woman who invented the multi-camera sitcom by basically inventing the multi-camera sitcom — watches a sketch troupe fail in front of an empty room, and explains, with something close to grief, what they've been deprived of.
Our Special Feature this month is called The Comedy Tax — what YouTube comedy costs the creator, in four currencies. The PG-13 ceiling, paid in jokes that never get told. Ironic-distance fatigue, paid in the slow erosion of meaning. The hour-long-essay arms race, paid in pacing. The parasocial trap, paid in dignity. We do not arrive at a happy answer. But we arrive at an honest one.
One housekeeping note. We promised in #013 that every issue from now on would feature one non-English Player Profile. This one does. Marco T., we hope Porta dos Fundos goes some way toward closing the loop — and Priya, please don't take a victory lap, but: you were right.
The medium is still funny. You just have to know where to look. We are, somehow, paid to look.
— The Editor
May 2026
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YouTube Adds "Comedy" Filter, Returns Mostly Reaction Videos
A long-requested genre filter rolled out to mobile this month, ostensibly making it easier to surface stand-up clips, sketch content, and original comedy. In practice, the top results in our test searches were dominated by reaction compilations and the algorithm's apparent belief that any video with the word "funny" in the thumbnail qualifies. We tested with five different accounts, varying account histories. Drew Gooden appeared on the third page. The first page was, in every test, a man laughing at TikToks. We are not making this up. We wish we were making this up.
Ryan George Confirms 1,000th Pitch Meeting; Refuses To Break The Format
In a milestone that doubles as a thesis statement, Ryan George quietly published his thousandth Pitch Meeting episode in late April. The format — Producer Guy talks to Screenwriter Guy, both played by George, both doing the same voice — has not changed in any structural way since 2018. Asked by an interviewer whether he'd ever consider varying the format, George reportedly said, "That's what we call surface tension. Tight! Tight! Tight!" We don't know if he was joking. We're not sure he does either. The Pitch Meeting is, increasingly, the answer to the question it keeps asking.
Three Major Comedy Channels Demonetised Same Week For "Sensitive Content"
Three established sketch and commentary channels — names withheld at their request, which is itself a story — reported simultaneous demonetisation strikes in late April for content the platform's auto-classifier flagged as "sensitive." In all three cases, the flagged videos contained jokes about death, mental health, or political figures, framed in ways that any human reviewer would identify as obvious comedy. All three were eventually reinstated after manual review. None were given an explanation. The chilling effect is not a bug; it is a feature performing exactly as designed.
CONFIRMED: There Will Be Another Drew Gooden iPad Video
Sources close to the situation (his subreddit) confirm that Drew Gooden's annual iPad reaction video — the running yearly state-of-the-union on Apple's most baffling product line — is in production for a 2026 release. We mention this only because we, the editorial board of CTRL+WATCH, have collectively rewatched every previous instalment three times. The bit has not gotten old. The bit, in fact, gets better the older it gets, which is itself a separate joke we appreciate. Surface tension; tight, tight, tight.
Brazilian Comedy Troupe Porta dos Fundos Crosses 26 Million Subscribers
In a milestone almost entirely uncovered by English-language YouTube press — a fact that is itself part of the story this issue is telling — Porta dos Fundos, the Rio-based sketch troupe, quietly crossed 26 million subscribers, making it one of the largest comedy channels on the platform by any reasonable metric. Their Christmas specials remain among the most-discussed (and most-protested) sketch comedy on YouTube globally. We profile them this issue. They have been making this content for thirteen years. We are late.
Average YouTube Comedy Video Now 23 Minutes Long, Up 400% Since 2018
A platform analytics report this quarter confirmed what every viewer already suspected: the average runtime of a video tagged as comedy on YouTube has ballooned from approximately 5.7 minutes in 2018 to 23.1 minutes in 2026. The driver is the mid-roll ad threshold. The cost is comedic timing. We will return to this in our Special Feature, but the short version is: when your incentive structure rewards length, your jokes will pad themselves out, and after a while the padding is the point. The padding is what people clicked on. The padding is what they're paying for. There is no joke; there is only the production of joke-shaped content.
Time Capsule
Six comedians and chroniclers of the form, brought forward to react to YouTube comedy. They are the people who would have something useful to say, if they could.
Player Profiles
Jenny Nicholson
~ 1.5M subs · long-form comic essay · sporadic, devastating output
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel was a 100,000-square-foot, $5,000-a-bed immersive theme-park experience that opened in March 2022 and closed twenty months later, having become one of the more spectacular failures in modern Disney history. Jenny Nicholson visited it. She made a four-hour video. The four-hour video about the failed hotel has, as of this issue going to press, more views than the hotel had visitors. There is a thesis in there somewhere about what survives the algorithm and what doesn't, and the thesis is: Jenny Nicholson does.
The Galactic Starcruiser video is the obvious entry point but it is also the late-stage Nicholson, the form fully matured. The earlier work — the Bronies essay, the Cats (2019) review, the entire trilogy of videos about the JonBenét Ramsey murder — is the apprenticeship. The form is consistent across all of it: Nicholson identifies a piece of culture that is sincere, enormous, and absurd, and then she describes it. Slowly. With an absolute deadpan. With the specificity of someone who actually went and looked. The comedy is in the mismatch between the calm, methodical voice and the cumulative ridiculousness of what she is calmly, methodically describing.
What She Does Extraordinarily Well
The first thing is research. Nicholson does not parachute into a topic; she lives in it for months. The Star Wars hotel video contains every detail of every meal, every rehearsed line of every cast member, every prop, every disappointment. She has receipts. She has photos. She has the hotel-issue paper menu and she has read it. The comedy is built on this foundation and could not exist without it: when she observes that the wine list contained a bottle described as having "notes of Endor," the joke works because we trust she is not making this up. Most YouTube comedy asks you to trust the comedian's bit. Nicholson asks you to trust her notes.
The second thing is structure. A four-hour video should be unwatchable. The Galactic Starcruiser one is — and we say this without exaggeration — paced like a feature film. There are act breaks. There are running gags that are seeded in hour one and pay off in hour three. There is a moment, around the two-hour-forty mark, where the entire video pivots from comic disappointment into something genuinely sad, and the pivot is earned because she has spent the previous two hours being funny enough to buy the right to break your heart. This is a thing essayists do. It is not a thing comedians on YouTube usually attempt.
Jenny Nicholson is what happens when a stand-up comedian is replaced by a research librarian and the research librarian turns out to be funnier.
The third thing is voice. Nicholson speaks in a register that is both very young and very dry — a sort of early-2010s Tumblr cadence aged into something more melancholy. The voice has not changed materially in seven years and we suspect it never will. It is the voice of someone who has been disappointed by the things she loves and refuses to stop loving them. This is, we would argue, the only correct emotional position from which to make criticism, comic or otherwise, on the internet today.
Where She Falls Short
Output. Nicholson posts roughly one major video per year. That is a fact, not a complaint, but it is a fact that affects the score. A channel that uploads once a year cannot serve as a regular comedy diet; it serves as an event. We score Consistency at 65, which is very low, and we are at peace with this — but it does mean she scores a hair below the channels with comparable quality and steadier output. The Galactic Starcruiser video is more important than ten of most other channels' total annual production, but the algorithm doesn't care, and arguably neither should we.
The other limitation is range. Nicholson is brilliant on theme parks, brilliant on franchise media, brilliant on niche fandom — but she has never quite expanded out of the cultural-detritus lane. There is no political Nicholson video. There is no Nicholson video about labour. We are not asking for one, exactly. But the limit of the project is that it is a project: an investigation into the specific phenomenon of mass culture sold as personal experience. Inside that lane, she is unmatched. Outside it, we don't know.
The verdict. Nicholson is the proof of concept that long-form video essay comedy can survive — that the form is alive, that there is an audience for it, that the algorithm does not have to be obeyed. The Star Wars hotel video is, if we are honest with ourselves, the single most important YouTube comedy artefact of the 2020s so far. ESSENTIAL is correct. Top 50 entry at #9, with a note in the editorial section about the Consistency drag.
Ryan George / Pitch Meeting
~ 3.6M subs · structural / formula comedy · weekly, since 2018
Pitch Meeting is the simplest sketch on YouTube. Ryan George plays both characters. One of them, the Producer, says "tight" too many times and approves things he shouldn't. The other, the Screenwriter, explains that the plot of whatever film is being mocked relies on the Producer not asking obvious questions. The Producer doesn't ask. The Screenwriter says "Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience." The episode ends. The episode is six to eight minutes long. There have been more than a thousand of these. There will, as long as Hollywood exists, be more.
Comedy theorists will tell you that the hardest joke in the world is the same joke told for the seventh time. Ryan George is, by this metric, doing the hardest job in YouTube comedy. He has been doing it for eight years. The joke has not gotten old, which is itself the joke, which is itself the additional joke. Pitch Meeting is comedy as Zen koan. The format is the punchline.
What He Does Extraordinarily Well
The mechanical thing first: George plays both halves of the conversation, alone, in a single edit, without a co-star, without studio polish, in roughly the same green-cushioned office every time. The voice for the two characters is barely differentiated — it is the same voice, doing two things, and your brain accepts that they are two characters because the script says so and George commits to it. The cheapness of the production is part of the bit. He doesn't fix it; he never has. Every Pitch Meeting looks like the first Pitch Meeting. Every Pitch Meeting is the first Pitch Meeting.
The structural thing: the Pitch Meeting framework lets George do something that genuinely difficult — film criticism that is funnier than the film. The episode about The Last Jedi identifies, in seven minutes, every plot beat that requires the Producer not to ask a question; the episode about Christopher Nolan's Tenet is funnier than Tenet; the episode about Morbius is, almost by definition, funnier than Morbius. The form is criticism wearing a wig, and the wig has been on so long it has become its own face.
Ryan George has made the same joke a thousand times and the joke is still funny. That's not laziness. That's discipline that looks like laziness, which is itself a comedy trick most professionals never master.
The third thing — and this is what tips the X-Factor score — is that "Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience" has escaped containment. It is now a phrase used by people who have never seen the channel. It has entered the language. Very few YouTube comedians can claim that. Drew Gooden cannot. Danny Gonzalez cannot. Eddy Burback, despite our affection for him, cannot. George can. He has built a meme and the meme has built him.
Where He Falls Short
Replay Value is the issue. You watch a Pitch Meeting once. The format is too tight to reward rewatching the way an essay video does — the punch is in the structural reveal, and once revealed, it stays revealed. Hardcore fans will rewatch the all-time greats (the Last Jedi one, the Cats one, the Avatar 2 one), but the median Pitch Meeting is consumed once, laughed at, and never returned to. We score Replay at 70.
The other thing is that the format is genuinely narrow. Every Pitch Meeting is about a film with a plot hole. There is no Pitch Meeting about a film that is genuinely good and has no plot holes; the format wouldn't work. This is not a complaint, but it is a ceiling. George has, increasingly, branched out into other formats — the Honest Trailers-style breakdowns, the original sketch material — and the original sketch material is fine, but it is not Pitch Meeting, and we do not pretend otherwise. The channel is the format. The format is the channel.
The verdict. Pitch Meeting is the most consistent comedy show on YouTube, full stop. It is not the funniest. It is not the deepest. It is, every Friday, exactly what it said it would be — and after a thousand episodes of being exactly what it said it would be, that is its own kind of greatness. EXCELLENT, with strong Top 50 entry. Tight; tight, tight, tight.
Eddy Burback
~ 1.7M subs · stunt-form long-form comedy · sporadic, ambitious, increasingly strange
Eddy Burback ate at every Olive Garden in Manhattan, and then he ate at every Olive Garden in a single state, and then he visited every Bass Pro Shops in America, and now he is making videos that are essentially feature-length comic documentaries about the saddest fast-food restaurants in the country. He is, by any measure, the most ambitious of the post-Drew/Danny generation of YouTube commentators — and he has done the thing the older guard didn't, which is leave the desk.
Burback came up in the Drew Gooden / Danny Gonzalez / Kurtis Conner ecosystem, started as a commentary YouTuber, and somewhere around 2022 quietly committed to a different project: real-world stunts framed as comic essays. The "I Spent a Week at Every Olive Garden" video was the breakthrough; "We Lived in Bass Pro Shops for 24 Hours" cemented it; the Buc-ee's video confirmed he was building a body of work, not just doing a bit. He is what happens when a commentary YouTuber decides to actually go outside, and what he finds outside is the same thing the commentary YouTubers were already mocking, except now it is on camera and you cannot pretend you were just making it up.
What He Does Extraordinarily Well
The first thing is the deadpan. Burback's camera presence is a man genuinely confused by what he is seeing, who has chosen to keep going. The sincerity of the confusion is the engine. When he sits in his fortieth Olive Garden of the day and the waitress asks how he's doing, the joke is not the punchline he delivers; the joke is that the punchline is barely a punchline, and the confusion is real, and we are watching a man slowly realise that the experience he is documenting is genuinely, structurally, weirder than anything he could have written.
The second thing is editing patience. Burback sits in a moment for longer than he needs to, the way a documentary filmmaker would, and the unusual length is itself a comic gesture. There is a moment in the Bass Pro Shops video where he is alone on the artificial lake at 4am, having committed to sleeping there, and the camera holds on his face for a full eight seconds before he says anything. The eight seconds is the bit. The eight seconds is what nobody else on YouTube comedy is doing right now, because the algorithm does not understand the eight seconds.
Eddy Burback inherited the deadpan from Drew Gooden, the chaos from Danny Gonzalez, and the willingness to sleep in a Bass Pro Shops from his own peculiar conviction. The result is the most exciting comic documentarian on the platform.
Where He Falls Short
The output is uneven. Burback's major projects are extraordinary; his shorter videos, the ones in between, are commentary-YouTuber-by-numbers — not bad, not memorable, made because the channel needs to keep the algorithm fed. The big stunts are 9/10. The filler is 6/10. We score Consistency at 70 to reflect this, which is generous, and only because the big stunts are so big they deserve grace for the in-between weeks.
The other thing is that the stunt format is, by its nature, exhausting. There is an upper limit to how many "I went to every X" videos he can make before the bit eats itself, and the closer he gets to that limit, the more we worry. The 2025 video about visiting every Cracker Barrel had moments where Burback himself looked depleted, and the audience could see it. The format requires an inexhaustible curiosity that no human actually possesses, and the camera tells the truth about that. He needs to evolve the framework before the framework wears him out, and we are not sure he has fully figured out what that evolution looks like.
The verdict. Burback is the most exciting comedy commentator on YouTube right now, full stop — but at 83, he sits one point below our current Top 50 entry threshold. We flag him as a watch-list channel: the next big stunt video, if it lands the way the Olive Garden one did, moves him into the Top 50 cleanly. EXCELLENT verdict, no Top 50 entry this issue, and a strong recommendation that he is the future of the genre, not its present.
Porta dos Fundos 🇧🇷
~ 26M subs · Brazilian sketch comedy troupe · multiple uploads weekly · est. 2012
Porta dos Fundos has 26 million subscribers, has been making YouTube comedy for thirteen years, and has never been reviewed in this magazine until now. That is a problem of our own making, and this profile is part of correcting it. The promise we made to Marco T. of São Paulo in Issue #013 was that the Portuguese-speaking world would not stay invisible to us. Fulfilling that promise meant starting with the most obvious channel imaginable, the one we should have written about years ago, and which we are writing about now with the appropriate amount of mild self-flagellation.
The format is studio-quality sketch comedy, multiple uploads per week, in Portuguese, with subtitles available in roughly twenty languages but rarely the first thing English-speaking viewers encounter. The troupe — founded in Rio in 2012 by Fábio Porchat, Antonio Pedro Tabet, and three others — produces sketches that are structurally indistinguishable from peak-era SNL or Key & Peele in terms of writing, performance, and production. The reason most readers of this magazine have not heard of them is not that they aren't excellent. It is that the Anglosphere comedy press has, for thirteen years, decided they don't count. That decision was wrong.
What They Do Extraordinarily Well
The first thing is volume at quality. Porta dos Fundos uploads multiple times a week and the median sketch is genuinely good — not "good for an internet sketch troupe," but good in the way that a strong SNL Update segment is good. The hit rate is the production miracle. Most sketch troupes who upload at this volume produce mostly mediocre content with the occasional standout. Porta produces consistently strong work, and a few times a year produces something that breaks containment internationally — usually a Christmas special, usually one that gets them protested or sued.
The second thing is the willingness to provoke. The 2019 Christmas special The First Temptation of Christ earned them a Molotov cocktail thrown at their offices and an attempted court injunction in Brazil. The 2023 Christmas special continued the tradition with a sketch that several members of Brazilian congress called for criminal prosecution over. The troupe's response, broadly, has been: keep doing it. There is a directness in their political and religious sketch comedy that simply does not exist anywhere on the English-language YouTube algorithm right now, because the English-language YouTube algorithm has trained that directness out of its comedians via demonetisation. Porta still has it because they had to fight a different fight to keep it. They won that fight. They are, quietly, the proof that another comedy ecosystem is possible.
Porta dos Fundos is what English-language YouTube comedy used to be, before the platform decided it was too risky. The fact that this magazine is only now profiling them is our embarrassment, not theirs.
Where They Fall Short
The X-Factor score is held back, honestly, by a question of distinction. Porta is excellent — but their excellence is the excellence of a working professional sketch troupe doing the work very well. There is no individual signature voice the way there is with Drew Gooden or Jenny Nicholson; there is, instead, a writers' room and a stable of performers operating at a consistently high level. This is a different kind of value. It is closer to SNL at peak than to a single creator's vision. We score X-Factor at 78, which feels honest — the channel is irreplaceable in Brazilian comedy, but as a YouTube voice it is institutional rather than individual.
The other thing — and this is the limit, not a complaint — is that the cultural specificity of much of the sketch material does not always travel. The political sketches require a working knowledge of Brazilian politics; the religious sketches require some familiarity with Brazilian Catholicism; the workplace sketches make assumptions about Brazilian office culture that English-speaking viewers will partially miss. The subtitles do their job, but a subtitle cannot translate the laugh that comes from recognition. We score Replay at 75 partly for this reason — outside Brazil, the rewatch curve is shorter than it is for native viewers.
The verdict. EXCELLENT, no Top 50 entry this issue (the score sits below our current threshold of 84), but a watch-list note for re-evaluation. Marco — we hope this goes some way. Anyone reading this who has not watched The First Temptation of Christ with subtitles on: please do, and please report back. The next non-English profile is already commissioned for #015. Priya, you don't need to write in again. We get it. We're learning.
Boss Fight
Best friends. Parallel careers. Same agent, same touring history, same general body of work, same approximate audience, near-identical formats. They have collaborated on more than a hundred videos together. They have been mistaken for each other in subreddits. They are listed in every "comedy YouTubers" recommendation engine within two slots of each other. And yet, fundamentally, only one of them is funnier than the other one. The fight is not about whether to watch them. You will watch them both. The fight is about which one you would watch alone, on a long flight, with no internet, with one thirty-minute video to keep you company.
That is, in fact, the test we ran. We ran it twice. We disagreed. The Editor and the Reviews Editor disagreed. The Reviews Editor and the Time Capsule Editor disagreed. We had to put it to the room. The room split 4–3. We are publishing the result of the 4–3 vote. The losing minority gets to write the dissenting note in next month's letters page if they want to. They probably will.
What's at stake in this fight isn't really which YouTuber is funnier. It's a question about what comedy values most. Restraint or commitment. Iceberg or volcano. The deadpan that trusts the audience to find the joke, or the explicit chaos that hands the joke over with both hands and stays late to make sure you got it. Both are valid comic positions. We have to pick one anyway.
Content Quality
Drew's videos are slower and more written. The iPad reaction videos, in particular, are essentially personal essays on bad consumer technology, where the comedy emerges from the gap between the corporate sincerity of an Apple product page and the actual experience of using the thing. The writing is tight, the structure is essayistic, and the laughs are earned by the architecture rather than the delivery.
Danny's videos are looser and more performative. He is, more often than Drew, willing to follow a piece of internet content into its weirdest corners and stay there past the point where comfort would suggest leaving. The "Hi5 Studios" videos, the McJuggerNuggets retrospectives, the ongoing series of explorations of TikTok's strangest creators — these are committed pieces of comic anthropology, and Danny is the better anthropologist of the two.
Where they differ specifically: Drew is a better essayist. Danny is a better embedder. Drew writes about content; Danny inhabits content. Both are valuable. The question is which serves YouTube's particular medium better. We narrowly think Drew's approach produces a higher per-video quality ceiling, while acknowledging that Danny's hits more often.
Consistency
Danny uploads more often, more predictably, and with a tighter quality floor than Drew. A median Danny Gonzalez upload is funny. A median Drew Gooden upload — and we say this with affection — is good but not always laugh-out-loud funny. The frequency gap is real: Danny posts roughly four times a month; Drew posts roughly once. Over a calendar year, this matters.
The other Consistency dimension is staying-power. Both have been doing this for nearly a decade without burning out, which is itself a feat. Danny's pace is more aggressive, which makes the burnout risk higher; Drew's pace is more sustainable, which makes the audience attrition risk higher. Both have managed the trade-off competently. Neither has had a public mental-health crisis on camera, which on YouTube in 2026 counts as a structural achievement.
Round goes to Danny on volume and reliability, with no hesitation. Drew's defenders will note that "fewer, better videos" is a defensible position. It is. It just isn't a Consistency win. Consistency is what you can count on. Danny is what you can count on.
Replay Value
This is where Drew's restraint pays its biggest dividend. The deadpan video essay format ages exceptionally well. The 2019 iPad video is funnier in 2026 than it was in 2019 — partly because Apple's product line has somehow become even more baffling, partly because the deadpan registers differently when the cultural reference points have aged. The videos do not date. The voice does not date. We have rewatched the iPad trilogy three times this year, for editorial reasons. We are not bored.
Danny's videos, by contrast, are tied to specific pieces of internet content that have, in many cases, vanished. The McJuggerNuggets videos require remembering McJuggerNuggets. The TikTok exploration videos require those TikToks to still exist, which they often don't. The bit-driven comedy is, by its nature, more time-locked than the essay-driven comedy. This is not a flaw — it is a property of the format Danny has chosen — but it does mean the rewatch experience is shorter and shallower.
The other thing: Drew's deadpan rewards repeated viewing the way a Steven Wright joke rewards repeated viewing. There are micro-pauses you didn't catch the first time. There are flickers of expression that recontextualise lines you thought were straight. Danny is not asking for that kind of attention; his comedy lives in the moment of first watch.
Community
Danny has built a more cohesive named community — the "Greg" community, with its in-jokes, its merch, its shared vocabulary. This is a real achievement and not a small one. Drew's audience is more diffuse: it self-identifies as Drew Gooden viewers, but does not have a name, a flag, or a unified comment-section culture.
Drew's audience is, however, generally more articulate in comments. There is a higher signal-to-noise ratio in his comments section than in Danny's, where the meme-density is higher but the analytical comment is rarer. Both have their virtues. A successful comedy creator should probably have a name for their audience and a culture; that is the standard cited by anyone who values community-building. Drew's audience is high-quality but not organised. Danny's is organised and high-quality. By the textbook, Danny wins this. We're going to call it a draw, for the rare situation where both communities are demonstrably excellent in different ways.
X-Factor
X-Factor is the question of irreplaceability. If Drew Gooden vanished from the internet tomorrow, what specifically would be lost? If Danny Gonzalez vanished from the internet tomorrow, what specifically would be lost? Both questions have answers. The answers are different.
If Danny vanished, the loss would be a particular comic energy — the willingness to commit to an absurd bit at full volume for an extended runtime. There are other YouTubers who do this. None of them do it as well as Danny. But the lane is populated. Kurtis Conner is in it. Eddy Burback, in his shorter videos, is in it. The space would be diminished but not abolished.
If Drew vanished, the loss is more specific and more total. Drew Gooden is the only deadpan comedy essayist on YouTube currently working at scale. The deadpan comedy essay is, structurally, what we lost when late-night TV imploded — Letterman's quiet bits, Conan's slow moments, the spaces in television comedy where the joke was permitted to wait. YouTube comedy in 2026 is, in aggregate, a loud medium. Drew is one of the few people inside it making quiet work that holds up. There is no replacement waiting in the wings. If he stopped, that register stops.
This is, we think, the deciding factor. Danny is excellent at a thing several other people are also good at. Drew is excellent at a thing nobody else on YouTube is currently doing. The X-Factor case for Drew is not that he is funnier than Danny — it is that the medium needs him more than it needs Danny, and the medium would notice his absence more.
One additional thing, because it has to be said: Drew's collaborations with Danny are funnier than either of them alone. The "We Are Two Different People" videos, the cross-channel bits, the way Drew's restraint sets up Danny's chaos and how Danny's chaos punctures Drew's restraint — this is a comic chemistry that exists because the two of them are different, and the difference is exactly what this round is asking us to weigh. We are weighing it. The answer points the same way.
| CATEGORY | DREW GOODEN | DANNY GONZALEZ |
|---|---|---|
| Content Quality | 84 | 82 |
| Consistency | 84 | 86 |
| Replay Value | 86 | 78 |
| Community | 86 | 88 |
| X-Factor | 92 | 86 |
| OVERALL | 86 | 84 |
The Decision
Drew Gooden wins. 86 to 84. Two-point margin. Three round wins, one round loss, one draw. The decision is close. The decision is honest. The room split 4–3 and the four were correct.
What Danny does that Drew can't: commit to a long-form bit at full volume and not flinch from the ridiculousness of it. The Hi5 Studios deep-dives, the musical sketches, the sustained character work — Drew cannot and would not do these things. Danny is the better full-body performer, the better chaos engine, the better builder of internet community. None of this is in dispute.
What Drew does that Danny can't: leave the joke alone. Trust the silence. Let the iceberg do the work. The deadpan video essay is its own discipline, and it is rarer in 2026 than it was in 2019, and Drew is its current best practitioner on this platform. The X-Factor round decides this fight, and we say so explicitly: the medium needs Drew more than the medium needs Danny, and that is what irreplaceability means.
In ten years, Drew Gooden will be cited as the YouTuber who proved deadpan still worked. Whether that's a compliment or a eulogy is the question this Boss Fight cannot answer.
Post-Fight
Drew Gooden enters the Top 50 at #35 (86, EXCELLENT), slotting in at the bottom of the 86-tier on X-Factor weighting. Danny Gonzalez enters at #47 (84, EXCELLENT), in the lower 84-tier alongside Ryan George. Both deserve their spots; neither displaces a recently-entered channel. Hemingway, somewhere, has approved of the deadpan. Lucille Ball, somewhere, has noted with concern that neither of them owns the room. Both observations are correct.
High Scores
The master ranking after Issue #014. Four new entries, four drops, the 86–84 tiers compressed by comedy's arrival. New entry threshold: 84.
| # | Channel | Score | Genre | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3Blue1Brown | 96 | Mathematics / Education | — |
| 2 | Kurzgesagt | 94 | Science / Animation | — |
| 3 | Every Frame a Painting | 92 | Film analysis | — |
| 4 | Primitive Technology | 91 | Bushcraft / Silent | — |
| 5 | Jacob Geller | 91 | Video essay / Games | — |
| 6 | Adam Neely | 91 | Music theory | — |
| 7 | CGP Grey | 91 | Education / Animation | — |
| 8 | Lemmino | 91 | Mystery / Documentary | — |
| 9 | Jenny Nicholson | 91 | Long-form comic essay | NEW |
| 10 | Fireship | 90 | Programming / Tech | ↓1 |
| 11 | Dan Carlin's Hardcore History | 90 | History / Long-form | ↓1 |
| 12 | Townsends | 90 | Historical cooking | ↓1 |
| 13 | Mark Rober | 89 | Engineering / Stunts | ↓1 |
| 14 | Veritasium | 89 | Science | ↓1 |
| 15 | Vsauce | 89 | Curiosity / Philosophy | ↓1 |
| 16 | Technology Connections | 88 | Tech / Appliances | ↓1 |
| 17 | Conan O'Brien / Team Coco | 88 | Comedy / Late-night | ↓1 |
| 18 | Contrapoints | 88 | Video essay / Cultural | ↓1 |
| 19 | exurb1a | 88 | Philosophy / Animated essay | ↓1 |
| 20 | Clickspring | 88 | Machining / Craft | ↓1 |
| 21 | Internet Historian | 87 | Internet history | ↓1 |
| 22 | Theo Von | 87 | Comedy / Podcast | ↓1 |
| 23 | Good Mythical Morning | 87 | Comedy / Variety | ↓1 |
| 24 | Caspian Report | 87 | Geopolitics | ↓1 |
| 25 | Historia Civilis | 87 | Ancient history | ↓1 |
| 26 | JCS — Criminal Psychology | 86 | True crime / Analysis | ↓1 |
| 27 | Tasting History | 86 | Historical cooking | ↓1 |
| 28 | Breaking Points | 86 | Politics / News | ↓1 |
| 29 | 12tone | 86 | Music theory | ↓1 |
| 30 | Like Stories of Old | 86 | Film / Mythology | ↓1 |
| 31 | Nerdwriter1 | 86 | Video essay | ↓1 |
| 32 | NileRed | 86 | Chemistry | ↓1 |
| 33 | Stuff Made Here | 86 | Engineering / Maker | ↓1 |
| 34 | Scott The Woz | 86 | Gaming / Comedy | ↓1 |
| 35 | Drew Gooden | 86 | Deadpan comedy commentary | NEW |
| 36 | Binging with Babish | 85 | Cooking | ↓2 |
| 37 | Tantacrul | 85 | Music / Software | ↓2 |
| 38 | Philosophy Tube | 85 | Philosophy / Performance | ↓2 |
| 39 | Real Engineering | 85 | Engineering | ↓2 |
| 40 | The Slow Mo Guys | 85 | Science / Visual | ↓2 |
| 41 | Map Men | 85 | Geography / Comedy | ↓2 |
| 42 | Smarter Every Day | 85 | Science / Engineering | ↓2 |
| 43 | TED-Ed | 85 | Education / Animation | ↓2 |
| 44 | Videogamedunkey | 84 | Gaming / Comedy | ↓2 |
| 45 | Whang! | 84 | Internet history | ↑2 |
| 46 | Ryan George / Pitch Meeting | 84 | Sketch / Format comedy | NEW |
| 47 | Legal Eagle | 84 | Legal explainer | ↓4 |
| 48 | Danny Gonzalez | 84 | Manic comedy commentary | NEW |
| 49 | Abroad in Japan | 84 | Travel / Documentary | ↓3 |
| 50 | Wendover Productions | 84 | Logistics / Geography | ↓5 |
Editorial Notes
New entries. Jenny Nicholson enters at #9, becoming the sixth ESSENTIAL channel in the 91-tier and the magazine's first comedy-essayist to hold the top tier. Her Consistency score of 65 is the lowest by a wide margin among any 91+ channel — a structural disadvantage that the other categories overwhelm. Drew Gooden enters at #35, anchoring the bottom of the 86-tier on X-Factor strength after winning the Boss Fight against Danny Gonzalez. Ryan George / Pitch Meeting takes #46 in the 84-tier — the discipline of making the same joke a thousand times is, at last, recognised as the comic achievement it is. Danny Gonzalez enters at #48, his lower X-Factor placement reflecting the genre saturation in the manic-commentary lane he occupies.
Drops. TLDR News drops from #50 — the lowest score on the previous Top 50 (83), now below the 84 entry threshold. Its tenure was defensible; its displacement is overdue. Tom Scott drops from #48: the announced production slowdown of late 2024 has, in 2026, become the production reality. The catalogue remains EXCELLENT and we will return to him for a re-evaluation if his output picks up. Philip DeFranco drops from #49 on ceiling grounds — fifteen years of daily news commentary have produced a steady-state product that is no longer earning its place against fresher work. Sideways drops from #44, also on ceiling grounds; the music-analysis lane has, since his entry, become more crowded, and his trajectory has plateaued at the level that originally got him in.
Big movers. Whang! moves up from #47 to #45 — the only upward movement in the 84-tier, earned on X-Factor weighting. His internet-history work has aged into something closer to canonical. Wendover Productions drops from #45 to #50, a five-position fall driven entirely by displacement; the score is unchanged at 84 but the new arrivals at the same score outrank him on tie-breaking. Legal Eagle falls four positions for the same reason. Neither is a quality complaint.
Compression note. The 86-tier now contains ten channels (was nine), and the 84-tier contains seven — both densities are at historical highs for those scores. The next score-86 candidate that emerges will need a strong tie-break case to enter cleanly. We expect a re-evaluation of one or two existing 86-tier channels by Issue #016 to relieve the pressure.
Negative review counter. Two issues since Issue #012's HasanAbi/Johnny Harris re-evaluations. Mandatory by Issue #015. We have a candidate. Letters are open.
The Comedy Tax
What YouTube comedy costs the people making it, in four currencies. The tax is paid in jokes you don't tell, sincerity you don't permit yourself, time you can't get back, and dignity you give away to keep the lights on.
Every medium taxes its practitioners. Stand-up taxes them in nightly bombing and missed family time. Television taxes them in network notes and the slow attrition of the writers' room. Print taxes them in editors who don't know what's funny. YouTube has its own taxes, and the taxes are specific enough that we think they deserve naming. We have identified four. There are probably more.
I. THE PG-13 CEILING
YouTube's monetisation policies are a moving target. The auto-classifier is an inscrutable god. The advertiser-friendly content guidelines are written in language vague enough to cover anything and specific enough to chill everything. The result is that every working comedian on the platform performs a continuous mental calculation, in real time, while writing: will this joke get the video demonetised? will this word? will this thumbnail?
The calculation is invisible to the audience. The audience experiences it as: comedy on YouTube is, in 2026, blander than comedy on television was in 1985. There are jokes that don't get made. There are subjects that don't get touched. Death is risky. Drugs are risky. Sex is risky. Mental health is risky. Politics is risky. Anything that involves a body doing something a body does is risky. What is left, after you remove all the risky subjects, is observational comedy about safe consumer products and meta-commentary about other YouTube videos, both of which have, not coincidentally, become the dominant comedic modes of the era.
The PG-13 ceiling is not enforced. It does not need to be. It is a self-imposed restraint, internalised by the comedian, that pre-emptively rules out three-quarters of the comic territory. The tax is paid in the joke that never gets written, because the comedian's brain has already classified it as a financial risk before it reaches the page.
II. IRONIC-DISTANCE FATIGUE
The dominant register of YouTube comedy from approximately 2018 onward has been ironic distance. The comedian holds the subject matter at arm's length, performs a mild contempt for it, and invites the audience to share in the contempt. This is not a problem in moderation; the problem is that for a generation of viewers, ironic distance has become the only emotional register available.
What ironic distance protects the comedian from is sincerity, and what sincerity carries is risk. Sincerity is the thing you can be wrong about. Sincerity is the thing the audience can mock you for. Ironic distance is, structurally, an insurance policy: if the bit doesn't land, you can pretend you didn't mean it, and the audience cannot prove otherwise. The cost of the insurance policy is paid in meaning. After a decade of pre-emptive ironic distance, the entire genre has begun to suffer from a form of comic anaesthesia: nothing is permitted to actually matter, because mattering is a thing that can be wrong.
The comedians escaping this fatigue — Jenny Nicholson during the moment when the Galactic Starcruiser video pivots, Drew Gooden in his quieter videos, Eddy Burback when the Bass Pro Shops at 4am gets to him — are doing so by, briefly, dropping the irony. The audience reaction is always the same: relief. We forget how badly we wanted someone to mean something until we encounter someone who does.
III. THE HOUR-LONG ARMS RACE
YouTube monetises by mid-roll ad insertions, and the ad-insertion threshold rewards videos longer than ten minutes, with the optimal length being whatever permits the maximum number of ad breaks before viewer drop-off. The result, traced over the last six years, is a steady inflation of comedic video length: the average comedy video on the platform has grown from 5.7 minutes in 2018 to 23.1 minutes in 2026.
The arms-race dynamic is straightforward: if competing creators are making longer videos, your shorter video looks unserious by comparison, even if the joke would have been better at half the length. Comedy that should be tight gets padded. Padding becomes structure. The structural padding becomes the form. After enough cycles, audiences come to expect the padding — they are paying for the length, in attention — and a tight ten-minute comedy video starts to register as anaemic.
The cost is paid in pacing. A joke that needed ninety seconds gets six minutes, and the six-minute version is worse than the ninety-second version, but the six-minute version is the one the algorithm rewards, so the six-minute version is the one that gets made. The comedian knows this. The comedian is not happy about this. The comedian's bank account is, however, somewhat happier than it would otherwise be, which is the entire point of the tax structure.
IV. THE PARASOCIAL TRAP
The fourth tax is the most insidious. To succeed on YouTube as a comedian, you must build a personal relationship with an audience that scales beyond the size at which a personal relationship is possible. Drew Gooden cannot, materially, be friends with three million people. Danny Gonzalez cannot, materially, know the names of his "Greg" community. The relationship is, by structural necessity, asymmetrical: the audience knows the creator; the creator does not, and cannot, know the audience.
Gilda Radner identified this in 1989, in her own diaries: she received letters from strangers who treated her as a friend, and she did not have the emotional resources to be a friend to ten million strangers, and the letters haunted her in the period before she died. The phenomenon has not gone away. It has been industrialised. The successful YouTube comedian is now expected to perform a continuous low-grade intimacy — to remember running jokes from the comments, to acknowledge fan birthdays, to maintain the illusion of personal access — and the illusion is what monetises.
The cost is paid in dignity. The cost is paid in the slow erosion of the boundary between performance and self. The cost, sometimes, is paid in burnout that looks like content quality decline but is actually a person grieving the version of themselves that existed before the audience needed them to be the friend they cannot be.
We do not, in this magazine, want to be moralising about this. The creators we love most are the ones who have figured out how to manage the parasocial trap with their own mental health intact. Drew Gooden's reticence — the rarity of his face, the lack of personal disclosure on the channel — is, we think, his answer to the trap. Jenny Nicholson's once-a-year output is hers. Both are forms of refusal. Both keep the work alive.
The comedy tax is real. It is paid in the same currencies it has always been paid in: time, sincerity, dignity, sleep. The platform is just a new way of collecting an old debt.
YouTube comedy survives despite all four taxes. The comedians who survive are the ones who have, often without articulating it, built specific structural defences against each one. We salute them. We watch them. We profile them, when we can find them. The tax is the price of admission. The point is what you make with what's left.
Game Over
Five comedy trends that have outlived their welcome. Each one started as a joke. Each one has been done to death. Each one is, by 2026, simply content shaped to look like comedy.
YouTube Comedians Filming Themselves Laughing At TikToks
The format: a YouTuber sits in front of a camera, plays a TikTok on their phone or in picture-in-picture, and laughs at it. Sometimes they pause to comment ("oh that's so true"). Sometimes they don't even comment. The video is twenty-four minutes long. It contains forty TikToks. The TikToks are the comedy. The YouTuber is the laugh track. The YouTuber is being paid to be a laugh track for someone else's comedy. The TikToker is not being paid. This is, structurally, the worst arrangement comedy has ever invented, and we are now in year three of it being one of the most-monetised formats on the platform.
The Hour-Long Video About A Five-Minute Joke
A bit happens. The bit is funny. The bit, told well, takes about ninety seconds. The YouTuber, however, has noticed that an hour-long video gets six mid-roll ads, and a ninety-second video gets none. So the ninety-second bit becomes a fifty-eight-minute video, padded with reaction shots, contextual setup, repeated explanation, and a deeply unnecessary "Part Two" tease. The audience watches the whole thing because they want the joke. The joke arrives at minute forty-seven. The joke is no longer funny. Nothing has been ruined more thoroughly by length than the modern YouTube punchline, which now arrives carrying the weight of fifty-five minutes of expectation it cannot possibly meet.
"I Rewatched [Thing] So You Don't Have To"
The premise is comic martyrdom: the YouTuber has voluntarily subjected themselves to something tedious — a bad film, a long YouTube series, a multi-season reality show — and is now reporting back, like a war correspondent returned from the trenches. The format works once or twice. It has been done thousands of times. The bit collapsed when YouTubers started rewatching content they obviously enjoyed and pretending they didn't, in order to maintain the ironic-distance posture demanded by the format. The Truman Capote interview earlier in this issue covers the larger version of this rot, but the YouTube-specific version is its own subspecies, and 2026 is its peak.
The Comedy Podcast That Became Four Men Explaining Things
It started as a podcast where four comedians riffed. The riffs were funny. Then one of the comedians read a Wikipedia article. Then another one shared a takeaway from a Sam Harris episode. Then the third one explained a market dynamic he had heard about. By 2026, the same podcast that began as four comedians making each other laugh is now four men taking turns explaining concepts they read about that morning, occasionally interrupted by a forced bit. The comedy has been outsourced to occasional guests. The hosts are too tired, or too settled, or too pleased with themselves, to actually be funny on a regular basis. The audience is still showing up. The audience deserves better. Several specific podcasts spring to mind. We will not name them. They know who they are.
The "Are You Gay?" Thumbnail
The thumbnail shows the YouTuber's face with a question superimposed in large yellow text: "ARE YOU GAY?" or some variant ("AM I LOSING IT?", "DID I JUST DIE?", "IS THIS THE END?"). The thumbnail has nothing to do with the content of the video, which is usually a fifteen-minute commentary on something unrelated. The bait is the identity-grab — the audience clicks because they want to know the answer. The answer, if it appears at all, is delivered in the first thirty seconds and is never the actual content. The thumbnail is a trick. The trick is performed thousands of times a day across the platform. The trick is, increasingly, the entire content of YouTube comedy: not the joke inside the video, but the bait that got you to click on it. After enough cycles, the bait becomes the comedy, the comedy becomes the bait, and the medium quietly forgets there was supposed to be a difference.
Yob's Save Point
"You actually did it. You profiled Porta dos Fundos. I read the news section first and I almost didn't believe it. Thirteen years they have been making the best comedy on YouTube and the English-language press has never noticed. Thank you. Now do Choque de Cultura next. Or Hermes e Renato. Or any of the dozens of others I will keep mentioning. Brazil is funny. We have always been funny. You finally noticed."
"I am told I am not allowed to take a victory lap. I am taking a small one anyway. Three issues, three letters, and now we have a permanent commitment to non-English Player Profiles in every issue. The Global Issue was good. The fact that you are continuing past it is better. Now: when do we get an Indian comedian profiled? AIB before the implosion was extraordinary. All India Bakchod, you must search for. Tanmay Bhat alone now. The Hindi-language sketch comedy on the platform is enormous and you have not touched it. I am, with affection, still waiting."
"My Type 7 framework was credited again last issue. I am genuinely flattered. I am also writing to propose a new framework, because I have a problem and you might want to publish it. The problem is: there is a category of YouTuber who is technically classifiable as comedy but who is actually performing therapy, on camera, while pretending to be funny. The therapy is the actual content. The comedy is the wrapper. I have been calling this Type 8: The Wrapped Confession. Examples on request. Use it or don't, but at least credit me when someone else proposes it in eighteen months."
"Why do you never review channels with under five hundred thousand subscribers in the main Player Profile section? The Hidden Levels page is good but it's clearly the kids' table. The big channels you cover are mostly the same big channels everyone covers. There is excellent comedy happening at the 50K-200K subscriber tier and your magazine is too cool to look at it. Be less cool. Look at it."
"I want to defend Tom Scott. He has not retired, he has slowed down, and the slowdown is itself a kind of editorial achievement. He has done what Drew Gooden has done — chosen a sustainable rate of output rather than burning himself to ash for the algorithm. Dropping him from the Top 50 because he is uploading less feels punishing, and it punishes exactly the behaviour we should be celebrating. Reconsider, please."
"I make a comedy channel with about 150K subscribers. The Comedy Tax piece in this issue made me cry. Not because it was sad. Because someone finally wrote down what I have been trying to articulate for three years. I am going to print it out and tape it next to my desk. I am also going to consider, seriously, whether I should be making the videos I am making, or whether I have already paid all four taxes and have nothing left to spend. Thank you. Not in the suck-up way. In the actual way."
"My wife and I have a running disagreement that I would like to put to your magazine. She thinks Drew Gooden is funnier. I think Danny Gonzalez is funnier. We have been arguing about this since 2020. The Boss Fight in this issue declares Drew the winner. My wife has cut it out and put it on the fridge. I have nothing left. Please advise."
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