Comedy Creators Who Use Short Videos Inventively

Bo Burnham began in 2006 with comic songs filmed alone in his bedroom, and the cheap, direct format became part of the joke. He returned to the same idea on a grand scale with Inside (2021), made entirely in one room during lockdown, whose songs and camera tricks feel like the most elaborate short videos ever stitched together.

Zach King made his name on Vine in 2013 with six-second magic vines, seamless edits in which he seems to step into a drawing or pull objects out of screens. He calls the style digital sleight of hand, and the precise planning behind each gag has carried it from Vine to TikTok for more than a decade.

Lele Pons was the most followed woman on Vine before it closed in 2016, known for physical slapstick squeezed into six seconds, with pratfalls and quick escalation. She carried that broad, bilingual comedy into YouTube sketches, music and acting, showing how the Vine generation learned to build a joke at speed.

Liza Koshy built her following on Vine with rapid-fire wordplay and quick-change characters, then moved to YouTube with sketches built on puns and frantic editing. That timing carried her into hosting, including the 2018 revival of Double Dare, and her own YouTube Premium series Liza on Demand.

Sarah Cooper's 2020 videos lip-synced Donald Trump's own words with exaggerated expressions and no added jokes, letting the mismatch between the audio and her face do the work. The format's economy made her a breakout star of the lockdown months and led to her Netflix special Everything's Fine (2020).

Jordan Firstman's Impressions, posted on Instagram in 2020, were not impressions of people but of ideas, objects and situations, played as fully committed characters. The surreal premise and tight writing made them one of the most imitated formats of the lockdown, and he went on to star in Rotting in the Sun and make his own film, Club Kid.

Munya Chawawa, a British-Zimbabwean comedian, broke through in 2020 with short satirical videos and parody raps that skewered the news within hours of it happening. His sharp characters and pastiches of British music styles showed how quickly a well-made short video can work as political comedy, and led to television work.

Khaby Lame began posting in 2020 after losing his factory job in Italy, and found his format in silent replies to overcomplicated life-hack videos: he simply does the task the easy way and opens his palms. Wordless and instantly readable in any language, the gag made him the most-followed person on TikTok.

Kris Collins, known as KallMeKris, started posting skits on TikTok in April 2020 and built a cast of recurring characters she plays herself, each sketch lasting thirty seconds to a minute. The consistency of those characters turned short clips into something like a sitcom, and in 2025 she made her feature directing debut with the horror film House on Eden.

Elyse Myers became known on TikTok for a story about her worst date, during which she bought 100 tacos, told straight to camera with superb comic timing. Her storytelling videos rely on nothing but pacing and delivery, and she has built them into a podcast, a book and music.