Update 05-08-2025 – there is a more recent post, with refreshed data, here.

There are lots of debates to be had around which comedian you find funny, who you think is the GOAT and so on. Obviously, comedy (and a sense of humour) is completely subjective and, as that sort of argument cannot provide us with a metric, we can only look for some data, to measure relative career success. Seeing someone regularly on panel shows isn’t a great indicator of how things are going.

In this blog we’ll pull out some figures and then you can argue it amongst yourselves!!

One stat that we cannot get at is ticket sales and, even if we could, that’s a tricky one because:

• A comedian that hasn’t toured for years (Peter Kay) may sell out a tour more quickly than one that tours 2-300 nights a year (Jimmy Carr). It looks good, in the press, when there is a story about how quickly tickets have shifted, but it’s not entirely indicative of consistent demand.
• The price of tickets can affect whether a venue sells out (or not) and it’s hard to measure that as it varies from country to country and also between smaller venues and arenas. Plus, some countries (USA) add on local taxes – and then you have varying VAT rates. Don’t imagine that the full ticket price is going to the artist – a lot of expenses to pay out first.
• Just because someone is advertised as appearing at a venue – doesn’t mean it was 100% sold out. These past few months there have been a few examples (mostly non comedians) of people that have set up “a night with” (or similar) and then had to cancel, due to poor ticket sales.
• Internationally some comics announce that they are going to “country X” but then only do major cities. From a fan’s perspective, there is appreciation for comedians that are willing to do smaller towns – but that can look less impressive, to the MSM, as it means performing in smaller, more remote venues.

All of which means the only other figures we can dig into would be around social media accounts and video upload / viewing statistics, across the various platforms.

YouTube

This post is going to look just at YouTube. Anyone can view this data as, when you go on to any YouTube channel, there is a …more link that, when you open it out, shows you:

1. how many videos have been posted
2. how many subscribers the channel has
3. how many views the channel has had overall.

Data is as of 21^st April 2025.

Although I did look at a lot of American comedians – we are going to have to ignore them, I’m afraid. Someone like Joe Rogan has had his podcast (on his channel) for many years and he’s posted 3,385 videos, has 19.7m subs and has had 5,999,244,732 views. That’s a telephone number!

Second to Rogan would be Gabriel Iglesias and he’s at about half that rate. With the size of the US population, those guys have a bit of an advantage! There’s just no point comparing US comics with UK ones (and we also have to consider that perhaps some comedians are just happy to sell tickets and don’t want to invest in using social platforms).

Let’s just concentrate on the Brits – but please note that my original list had 72 comedians on – so the screenshots, below, are just the top end of the lists.

How many videos?

If we check out first who is giving away the most material – Jimmy is way out in front. His channel already had a lot of stand-up clips and videos from TV shows (8 Out of 10 Cats etc.) and, in the past 18 months or so, he’s added in the Heckle Amnesty series. He’s uploading 40-70 new videos a month and Russell, in 2^nd place, is adding around 30 a month.

Michael McIntyre and Ricky Gervais are way, way down the “give aways” list and Peter Kays videos are fairly old stand up and TV shows (with a couple of new promos for his current tour). Rob Brydon is focussed on his podcast and Tommy Tiernan is about 50-50 (stand up and TV chat show).

There’s a lot of variation in the type / volume of content being posted – but Jimmy posts the most crowd work / stand up.

How many subscribers?

The top 3 here are interesting, if we look back to November 2022 (yes, I’ve been a comedy obsessive for a long time). In that time the channel growth has been:

• Russell Howard – 40,000
• Jack Whitehall – zero
• Jimmy Carr – 558,000

In 4^th place Ricky Gervais, in that time, has grown his channel by 41,000 subs – but they seem to be people subbing more in hope than expectation as he’s not posting new material (2 videos in 2 years).

How many channel views?

This is where we get into big numbers. In the past month the top 3 have grown their channel viewing totals by:

• Jimmy Carr – 29.79m
• Russell Howard – 4m
• Jack Whitehall – 200k

Who knew that providing people with lots of new material (crowd work video clips) would get people watching?

One final thought – TikTok is now challenging YouTube and so there would be another perspective to view there – except you can’t see a lot of information publicly.

YouTube moved into Shorts because of TikTok’s popularity, meaning many comics now have to feed content into both platforms. That’s as WELL as Facebook (which still delivers quite a lot of views, when you glance under any comedy video post), X and Instagram – plus a handful of smaller platforms.

Why bother going on terrestrial TV (which is probably limited to being viewed in ONE country) when you can post your own videos and publicise yourself to the world?