Comedy Is The Perfect Antidote to AI Slop

I’m sat here wearing a tatty blazer I bought in a charity shop and a pair of fake glasses. Jamie Vaughan compliments me on my work attire, and I explain. It’s an outfit for a deluded CMO part I’m playing in a satirical online series called Gordon Ramsay’s Marketing Nightmares.

It’s just another day for me working with the tremendous Henry Hayes.

This year I’ve already been Batman, a football hooligan, and tomorrow I’ll be in a recording session with a musical composer as we prepare to create a musical.

Welcome to the world of Linkedin comedy.

It’s a world you probably didn’t know existed. It’s a world you may even wish, didn’t exist. But alas, we’re here.

I’ve been making comedy on Linkedin for over a year now, and it was the result of two worlds colliding. Post-Covid I spent three years doing acting classes and I really bloody enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much I told myself I'd try and do this for a living. At the same time, I was supplementing this with my ghostwriting work on LinkedIn.

Pursuing a career in acting was sad and short lived to say the least. Way too much gatekeeping. So I chucked that in and fully focused all my attention to my client work. One day, the two worlds collided. I came across Henry Hayes on LinkedIn and recognised him from his “You Now Live In Stoke Newington” reel, which had been shared in my WhatsApp group. I reached out to him and told him about a sitcom I’d been writing. He was too busy but told me to get back in touch at the end of year. And so I did, but at that point he said ‘Ian, do you do Linkedin’? Next thing you know he’s telling me he wants to bring his comedy onto Linkedin and just like that, the perfect brief landed on my lap.

Since then I’ve helped Henry grow his audience and I’d say from a personal brand perspective Henry is in the top tier of Linkedin comedy creators. That’s a paradox in itself right, you may argue that comedy doesn’t belong on Linkedin. I get that, but I've always seen it as a procrastination tool just like Instagram or TikTok. The difference is you can scroll it at work and your colleagues think it's fair game.

I was in the first wave of the LinkedIn personal brand industry. I've watched it evolve from a handful of ghostwriters to a full-blown creator economy. And like everything, AI has democratised the barriers to entry. Everyone can create content now. Whether it's good or not, that's a different story.

I was explaining what I did at a family party in Brazil and someone asked if AI was going to make my work redundant. I ended up headbutting him which was a terribly traumatic experience but that's a story for another day. What I wish I'd said was...fair point, but if everyone can produce average content, there's an opportunity for above average content.

In the most pretentious way possible, comedy is a positive antidote to a stressful world. It helps people collectively laugh at the absurdities of working life in 2026.

But comedy can't stand alone. It breaks the ice, it gets you noticed, it makes people feel something about your brand. What sits behind it matters just as much. You need a cold, hard, professional outreach machine working in the background so that when someone laughs at your content and clicks through to your profile, there's a clear path from entertainment to conversation to conversion.

I’m going to let the master himself explain how it works commercially for Passionfruit.

“I’ve been creating comedy on LinkedIn since December 2025. In that time we've produced roughly 130 videos and generated nearly 8 million impressions. It's a full-scale operation. The comedy videos are top of funnel and we keep them specific to marketers, they go out consistently, and they do the job of getting Passionfruit noticed by the right people. Behind the scenes we use automation tools to identify the profiles engaging with our content, and I then send a personalised video via LinkedIn DMs. The comedy breaks the ice. The outreach machine converts it. In one month alone that generated 15 marketing qualified leads. A single video that cost us £687 to produce delivered 156 ICP decision-makers engaging, an 11 meetings booked, 5 MQLs, and a 15:1 ROI. My hot take? LinkedIn comedy could be B2B marketing's answer to the California gold rush.'"

What does this mean for Marketers?

The only way to actually capture and hold attention in 2026 is to entertain. Tracksuit's Entertain or Die 2.0 report studied the top 100 most entertaining brands in the world and found that 97% of the top 30 reported revenue growth, with two thirds achieving double-digit growth. The brands winning are the ones people actually want to watch. And it makes sense. People have become experts at subconsciously filtering out anything that smells like marketing. Comedy uses an age-old trick. It uses human emotion against itself to slip into the brain like a Trojan horse. It builds familiarity in a way that no white paper, carousel, or thought leadership post ever will.

Monzo, Surreal, Beehiiv, even Andreessen Horowitz are just a few brands already using comedy to cut through on LinkedIn.

But there needs to be a strategy behind it. If you've got the budget, hire a comedian. They're the best storytellers in the world and there are sadly a lot of unemployed ones. But if you want to start now, here's how I approach comedy writing.

Understand insider language and leverage it. If I went and performed stand up in Blackpool and said generic bad things about Blackpool, I'd get heckled off stage. If I went to Blackpool and said something super niche and well observed about a sandwich shop in Blackpool, I'd maybe get a giggle.

You use comedy to appeal to tribes, and in marketing it's pretty easy. Let's say you're selling a CRM solution. I imagine there are some very funny observations to people who work in CRM. Write down 10 things that piss you off about working in CRM. And 10 things that only people in CRM would know.

Each observation is the root idea for a sketch. Now you have to write a load of shit ones to get to something half decent, but you'll get there eventually.

I believe any company in the world can use well-written, strategic comedy. And I believe the people reading this newsletter are exactly the kind of marketers brave enough to try it.

So here's my challenge. Before the next issue of NoBrakes lands in your inbox, make one piece of content that makes your audience laugh. A skit, a meme, a self-aware caption… anything. Send it to us. We'll feature the best ones.

And if it bombs, don't worry. That's comedy. You have to write stuff that isn’t funny to get to something half decent. Trust me, I'm still writing stuff that’s unfunny. The incident in Brazil was totally real by the way.

About the guest contributor

Ian McKenzie is the founder of Found Interesting, where he helps B2B founders and companies use LinkedIn to generate inbound leads. He builds personal brands and employee-led content engines that are braver, funnier, more human. He's also just ventured onto Instagram where he currently has 4 followers, so the comedy clearly translates.

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