Top 10 YouTube Comedy Channels -TopX Ep. 3

- Thomas ‘Tomska’ Ridgewell’s channel deals with what he calls the 3 loves of his life: Action, Sketch Comedy and Cartoons.
- His most popular videos are his cartoons or animated shorts. These are consistently random and irreverent, but the style will actually seem very familiar to anyone who’s a fan of Cyanide and Happiness or Don Hertzfelt’s Rejected Cartoons.
- Next up are his “action” clips. Here he demonstrates some pretty high production value in his lampoons of various action movies and their tropes. As silly as these are, they’re also extremely well shot. You’d never think someone could put so much effort into a what if scenario about a team of elite commandos that has to work with a sniper who’s a pug.
- Lastly, the 3rd branch of his channel is Sketch Comedy. Here you’ll find the most variety, but suffice it to say that they’re actually quite clever. One of the more popular clips purports to be your standard prank montage, but is instead a rather grim chronicle of one guy destroying his relationship with his girlfriend.
- Tomska has actually divided his channel into 3 separate playlists for the divisions I’ve just laid out, so if you really want to binge on just his skits or just his animated shorts, he’s made it very easy for you.

- As with many comedy Channels, Tobuscus’ channel features animation, appropriately titled Tobuscus Adventures, where he annoys his friend Gaybuscus and occasionally goes on adventures and slays zombies. These are so incredibly popular that a crowdfunding campaign to make a game out of the series reached it 240,000 dollar goal in only 2 days…so keep your eyes peeled for that.
- Another one of best facets of his channel are his literal trailers. Not to be confused with Honest Trailers, Literal trailers describe in hilarious, musical detail the things that are happening onscreen in various game and movie trailers. Not only are these clever and very well written, but they’re also surprisingly well sung.
- He’s what you might call a veteran of YouTube and has been around since 2006 and garnered over 6 million subscribers, so the chances are you’ve run into one of his videos already and not even known it.

- Despite his rather humble beginnings on YouTube, Shane’s been able to branch out to other mediums in a rather impressive way. Produced, Directed, Starred in and (I’m assuming) wrote his own feature length movie: Not Cool, which you can download on itunes right now.
- One thing that he specializes in are parody music videos, where he rewrites and reenacts various popular videos to great affect. What’s most impressive about these is that he’s often able to capture the look and feel of the original; the parody never comes off as cheap or rushed.
- Despite that, many of his videos go the simple route. He has another channel that’s mostly devoted to videos he’s filmed on his phone, which, if nothing else demonstrates that he hasn’t lost touch with the real grass roots user created content that makes YouTube so great.

- The comedic duo of longtime friend Rhett Mclaughlin and Charles Lincoln Neal the 3rd, Rhett and Link have another channel that has been around almost as long as YouTube itself. In fact, their video “Facebook song” is both a pretty good example of their musical skit style, and demonstrates just how long they’ve been around. Does anyone still remember when facebook looked like that?
- As you’ve probably guessed by now, they like to sing songs. While other channels like to spoof other popular songs or videos, the most popular songs oh Rhett and Link’s channel are entirely original, both in style and in concept. That doesn’t mean they’re serious, in any sense of the word though…
- My personal favorite series from Rhett and Link is their Commercial Kings series. For this, they produced commercials for small businesses that would normally not be able to afford a commercial. Now, these feature a sort of self aware crapiness, paying homage to the fact that really terrible commercials often go viral.
- Lastly, they also host a morning show titled Good Mythical Morning. Although it is YouTube after all, so you can actually watch it any time of the day. Although this show is by no means unique in format and style to YouTube, it’s super well produced and features some pretty impressive guest stars, from YouTube celebs like PewdiePie to real world celebs like Daniel Radcliff.

- RWJ’s claim to fame is his show =3, which is something he started all the way back in 2005. On =3, Ray showcases and provides commentary on popular Youtube videos and other viral media. Those of you that have seen Tosh.O should be familiar with the style, although Ray definitely gets the “did it first” credit. A while back, he actually hired a new host for the show, so nowadays he doesn’t do it all himself, but thankfully, it’s still going strong.
- Ray has gone on to produce insanely successful podcasts, has written a graphic novel, wrote and sold a popular song, a web series, proving that the talent that helped push his channel to its popular status was not just a flash in the pan.

- Out of all the channels we’ve seen so far, Jenna Marbles’ is probably the most bare bones. Although she does the occasional skit or song, the bulk of her videos are just her in front of her computer. So why is she one of my personal favorites?
- Because she’s really, really funny. Most of her clips are rants or explanations about girl-related issues, and its often hilarious to hear these issues explained in such a no nonsense way. And that’s really the crux of it, Jenna tells it like it is, with a fair amount of cursing involved.
- Although she may be a bit crass, she’s also extremely witty, and uses her snap-cut editing style to mix in lightning fast jokes and references.
- What’s also makes her so fun to watch is that she clearly “gets” guy humor. So, as a male viewer, you get a hilarious look at the inner workings opposite sex from someone who seems to understand both sides quite well. They’re the only makeup tutorials I ever watch.

- Created by Ian Andrew Hecox and Anthony Padilla in 2005, Smosh quickly became one of the most popular YouTube Channels and has stayed that way ever since.
- They do skits and shorts about a huge variety of crazy crap, with a noted preference for geek culture. One particularly popular and well produced video is their Ultimate Assasin’s Creed 3 song, which is a music video sung from the perspective of, as you’d guess, an AC3 assassin.
- As the Assassin video demonstrates, as in a lot of their recent content, they’ve got a lot of planning and resources backing their videos. The production value is high, and as such their videos often feature a lot more effects and general polish than some of the others we’ve seen.
- Clearly they’ve gotten the attention of some of the right people, because they’re apparently in talks to star in their own feature film from Lionsgate in the near future
- Another great thing about Smosh is that they publish on a regular basis: every Friday they post a new video, so they’re a great channel to keep checking back on for consistent new content.

- As with pretty much every channel we’ve discussed today, Ryan Higa’s channel doesn’t only specialize in one thing. He does standard talking head vloging rants, a Q&A series called Dear Ryan, and, of course, funny music videos.
- Something you’ll notice right off the bat is that Ryan makes for a rather charming host. He’s featured in most, if not all the videos, his friendly persona is clearly something that helped the channel gain the insane amount of popularity its garnered for the years. Ironically, one of his most popular clips to date is a music video about how girls don’t ever date the nice guys
- One thing that’s especially noteworthy about his channel is that his older videos seem to be just as popular as his newer stuff. If you go to his page and sort by oldest to newest, you’ll see that even his first video has a staggering 38 million views.

- Barely Polical does sketches, comedy shorts and parody…stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I hear you asking, what makes them special. Well, it’s in the name. Although they don’t specifically focus on political videos, the channel first rose to fame with their “Obamagirl” videos, in which is attractive and seductively dressed young lady professes her love to you know who.
- Despite the Obamagirl stuff, the bulk of their popularity today comes from their “In the Key of Awesome” videos, which are music video parodies. Now, as we’ve seen before, lots of channels feature these, they seem to be the bread and butter of Youtube comedy channels. Their videos focus heavily on making fun of young female artists: Arianna Grande, Iggy Azalea, and most frequently, poor poor Keysha have all been lampooned by their videos.
- While a lot of other channels like to go for the “random” humor style, if there was ever a unifying theme for Barely Political, it would be pop culture in general. They seem to really like to poke fun at celebrities and pop icons more than anything. Where the New Zealand Deck Sealant commercial fits into all that… I don’t know

- After a Top 10 List fulllll of channels that do everything and the kitchen sink by ways of content, our #1 pick is devoted to 1 thing and 1 thing only. Epic. Rap. Battles.
- Now, on the surface, this may seem like a YouTube channel devoted to deleted scenes from 8 Mile, but that’s not the case. The “rappers” in question are all historical figures or public icons, characters that are you would not expect to see rapping.
- Their most renowned video, although not terribly relevant nowadays, is a rap battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, which to date has almost 100 million views. To put that into perspective, that’s like getting everyone in Canada to watch the video, and then you made them all watch it again 2 more times.
- What’s perhaps most impressive about ERB is that some of their videos even feature celebrities playing some of these historical figures; most notably comedy duo Key and Peele have been featured in a handful of their clips.
- As you’ve seen above, a lot of other channels like to do funny music videos. Epic Rap Battles floats to the top because of 2 things. 1 is consistency: the production value, quality of the writing and overall outrageous nature of the whole things really doesn’t fluctuate from clip to clip. The second is originality: because each video is a scenario they themselves have come up with, their clips are entirely original in their nature. Simply put, there were a lot of people making fun of how grimy Miley Cyrus looked in her videos…it takes a special something to envision what she would say in a rap battle against Joan of Arc.
- This mix of originality and consistency has secured ERB the top spot on our list.