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“I’m gonna miss toxic masculinity,” says the comedian Kiry Shabazz. “I feel like it’s going to be in a museum someday.”
In the ensuing standup routine, Shabazz describes a fight with a friend who, like him, is “doing the work” to be a better person. He called the friend several unprintable names while acknowledging: “I’m only calling you that because culturally that’s how I know how to express myself.” The friend’s reply to the torrent of insults: “I hear you and I receive that.” The whole thing, Shabazz says, made him “miss the good old days, when men handled beef like men”.
The bit encapsulates a dilemma of modern masculinity – how attempts at enlightenment battle with alpha-male impulses. On social media, the manosphere clamors for our attention, extolling traditional masculine virtues such as authority, protein powder and the stamping-out of empathy. Meanwhile, other voices point out the absurdity of that image and call for thoughtful, emotionally attuned understanding of manhood.
In short: it’s a ridiculous time to be male. And that’s good news for a genre of social media comedy that has emerged between the Hims ads. If 2024 was the year of thoughtful masculine standup, 2025 was the year of the self-mocking man sketch.
Comedy from standup to Saturday Night Live has long found fertile ground in shifting notions of masculinity. But in the past few years, comedians have developed followings with short sketches that cast them as flailing young men, stumbling their way through social situations that threaten their identities or expose them as clueless try-hards. And like all good comedy, they also expose a truth – in this case, about the absurd and contradictory experience of manhood in the 2020s.
Some sketches emphasize the weirdness of male friendship. In one, a woman teaches a group of guys how to be real friends (“I learned that texting your friends just to check in is nice and not totally weird,” says one). In another, a man is on cloud nine after a friend makes a shockingly intimate request: “text me when you get home.” Other sketches tackle self-importance (like the guy who says “partner” instead of “girlfriend”), mock male fragility (“how do you get the algorithm to respect you?”), or riff on the performative male trope. Then there are parodies of various iterations of man in 2025 – the insufferable finance bro, for instance, or the “grown man convinced he has haters” – “lions don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep,” he informs us.
As society interrogates masculinity, so do these comedians. Sample question: is it OK for guys to love board games?
This is the quandary at the heart of a Sahib Singh sketch that begins with him deeply invested in a game of Wingspan, a board game about birds. When his friends point out his enthusiasm – “he’s smiling!” – he backtracks in a panic: “I hate board games. I hate birds, too. I only know about indigo buntings ‘cause I used to hunt them.” On his way home, he asks ChatGPT if it’s OK for men to “enjoy board games a lot” and flees from a female friend who encourages emotional honesty. In his rush to escape, he’s knocked down by a passing car; lying on the street, he types another question into ChatGPT: “Is it gay to get hit by a car?”
Like others in the genre, the sketch confronts what another comedian, Robert Webb, has described as the fundamental definition of traditional masculinity: “the pursuit of not being a woman.” Singh, who has more than a million TikTok followers, and his fellow comics play with self-doubt and the conflict between our internal selves and the carefully crafted personas we show the world – a particular problem for insecure men, but surely one everyone can relate to. And as is often the case in these sketches, the comedian plays a version of himself. When you’re the target of your own joke, you can be brutally honest and win some understanding from the audience at the same time.
Dan Carney, another prominent TikTok comedian, also routinely plays himself – or at least someone with the same name – as in an account of his visit to a Pride parade as the straight boyfriend of a bisexual woman that’s received more than half a million views. In a series of cringe-inducing attempts to demonstrate his allyship, as he asks attendees awkward questions and demands to have his picture taken, he embarrasses his partner. “She didn’t even want me to come,” he says proudly. “I insisted.”
“I don’t want the joke to be at anybody else’s expense but my own,” Carney, who generally plays a naive, buffoonish version of himself, says in an interview. “Playing a well-meaning character allows me and the audience to explore a subject matter earnestly and without feeling like anybody’s under attack.”
Carney says he’s not focused on making a statement – but he does find masculinity funny. Much of that humor derives from insecurity, as in Singh’s sketch. In another of Carney’s videos, he hires a private investigator to determine whether he’s gay. He also points to the gap between social media and reality: “I mean, it’s gotten so ridiculous,” he says. “As a man, I’ll go online and I’ll doomscroll, and there will be some jacked guy telling me that I’m not working hard enough, and usually I’m, like, eating a Crunchwrap Supreme in bed at 2am.” And what’s always funny to him, he says, is people who take themselves too seriously.
That’s the kind of man the comedian and actor Eric Rahill has spent years parodying: the guy who posts narcissistic messages about his triumphs and struggles, all under the guise of motivating the masses. “To everyone who’s ever dealt with depression – this is for you,” Rahill says in one clip, before doing a huge number of possibly fake pullups. In another, he sits in a boat drinking: “Italy, wine and a new relationship with God. Life is good,” he says, before noting that later that day he nearly killed all his friends after “I severely overestimated my boating abilities trying to impress my guy friends”.
Rahill is among the early practitioners of this style of social media comedy; the pullup clip was posted to TikTok in 2021. And of course, this recent crop of self-mocking man clips didn’t emerge out of nowhere. They have a predecessor, for instance, in the YouTube and Vine videos of Rahill’s collaborator Conner O’Malley, who has played characters ranging from a red-pilled YouTuber to a very sad AI “entrepreneur”. Meanwhile, SNL has frequently parodied modern manhood in sketches like “Man Park”, where women take their male partners to a dog-park equivalent to try to socialize them, and “Straight Male Friend”, in which Bowen Yang celebrates having a simple-minded dope around. And the film Friendship, in which Tim Robinson’s desperate character tries to win the approval of a cooler guy, might be considered a long-form version of a social media sketch.
Others have blended the forms; the comedian Dan Licata – another O’Malley collaborator – filmed a standup special, For the Boys, last year in front of a crowd of teenage boys at his own high school, as a character whose sense of humor, rich in dick jokes, has never quite matured beyond that age. Interspersed amid the set are brief sketches in which he, a man who once broke both his legs jumping off a roof, tries to “impart wisdom” to today’s teens as they prepare for illustrious careers. “Dumb masculinity, I think, is very funny,” Licata says in an interview. “A lot of these self-serious, bro comedians nowadays are funny for reasons that they’ll never understand.”
The ascent of too many self-serious bros has inspired plenty of legitimate concern over the future of young men, seduced by the manosphere and swinging to the political right. But self-mocking man comedy offers an alternative narrative of modern masculinity: it’s a study in conflicting demands and expectations, a clash between honesty and performance. These comedians’ ability to poke fun at themselves is, if nothing else, testament to a self-awareness that my gender sorely needs.
