That’s why, here at Ticketsource, we used our expertise in tickets for comedy shows to discover who the most influential comedians are.
We’ve looked at their estimated net worth, the number of TV specials they’ve had, Twitter and Instagram followers, the cheapest ticket for their next show, the number of Google searches, and the average number of YouTube views their content gets.
We got a normalized score out of 10 for each category, before creating an average of the results to reveal the most influential comedians in the US and the UK.
We’ve looked at a variety of factors to figure out who are the most influential comedians in the US and UK. The blank spaces in the table represent where a comedian has no social media or has no upcoming shows.
Kevin Hart takes the crown as the most influential comedian in the US. Hart is a hilarious comedian who has also starred in several comedy films, where he has often starred alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Hart’s comic style delves into his insecurities and life experiences, particularly his height which stands tall at 5’2” or 157cm.
2. Chris Rock/Joe Rogan - 6.92/10 influence score
Chris Rock and Joe Rogan share the top spot with an influence score of 6.92. Rock recently made the headlines after he was slapped by Will Smith at the Academy Awards ceremony. Here, however, he takes second place in our list of the most influential comedians. As well as a brilliant stand-up career, Rock has starred in several films and animations, one of which being Madagascar, where he voiced the Zebra called Marty.
Joe Rogan has an incredibly successful podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which has featured several star guests. Rogan is also a huge MMA fan, and has commentated on several fights.
3. Trevor Noah - 6.77/10 influence score
Trevor Noah completes the top three with an influence score of 6.77/10.
The South African comedian is the host of The Daily Show which puts a comedic twist on news events in the world. Noah is also currently on tour, with his show ‘Back to Abnormal’.
One of the more controversial comedians in our list takes the number one spot with a score of 8.64/10. Jimmy Carr is known for his dark humour and for testing the boundaries of comedy. He is also known for shutting down hecklers in the crowd with witty responses.
2. Ricky Gervais - 8.16/10 influence score
Another controversial comedian takes second place with a score of 8.16/10. As well as a comedian, Ricky Gervais is an actor, director, and writer and has had several successful shows to his name. He was an actor and writer for the UK version of The Office, which later had a US version created, which was released four years after the UK release. Gervais also wrote two episodes for the US version.
3. Jack Whitehall - 7.21/10 influence score
Jack Whitehall completes our top three with a score of 7.41/10. Whitehall has starred as a guest in several different comedy gameshows, such as Taskmaster, A League of Their Own, and 8 Out of 10 Cats. Whitehall’s comedy focuses on his life experiences and relatability, entertaining viewers with his Netflix show, Travels with My Father.
With many celebrities extending their stand-up careers to film and television, we’ve looked at the estimated worth of the comedians on our list.
Jerry Seinfeld has the highest net worth of any of the other American comedians on our list, with an estimated net worth of $950 million. Seinfeld is known for his sitcom ‘Seinfeld’, where he played a semi-fictionalised version of himself. His stand-up style focuses on observational comedy, which covers aspects of everyday life.
Ricky Gervais tops the list of UK comedians with the highest estimated net worth at $140 million. Gervais has hosted the Golden Globes five times, in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, and 2020. His speeches often divide the crowd, particularly at the 2020 awards where he picked out nominees in the crowd and made jokes about them.
We’ve looked at the number of television, film, and Netflix specials our comedians have had, where the comedian’s name is in the title, as well as DVD’s released.
Trevor Noah has the most TV specials with 11. Alongside hosting The Daily Show, and Tonight with Trevor Noah, the South African has had 10 stand-up specials air on television, two of which, ‘Trevor Noah: Afraid of the Dark’ and ‘Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia’ are featured on Netflix.
John Bishop takes top spot with 15 TV specials and DVDs released during his career. Five DVDs of Bishop’s were released between 2010 and 2018 showing his stand-up shows, with his most recent called ‘John Bishop Winging It Live’ which was filmed live at the London Palladium. Bishop has recently launched his ITV show, ‘The John Bishop Show’ which was originally released on BBC in 2015.
Ellen DeGeneres takes the top spot with 77.4 million Twitter followers, almost 40 million more than Kevin Hart in second place. DeGeneres is more recently known for her talk show, The Ellen Show, which regularly featured high-profile guests. Before DeGeneres was the voice of Dory in Finding Nemo, she dabbled in stand-up comedy, where she became famous for her quietly quirky routines.
Ricky Gervais takes the top spot again with 15 million Twitter followers, more than twice as many as our second place, Jimmy Carr, who has 6.7 million Twitter followers. Amongst his humorous and promotional tweets, Gervais regularly retweets animal charities and animal rescue pages.
Kevin Hart takes the top spot with 152 million Instagram followers, 30 million more than Ellen Degeneres who had the most Twitter followers. There is a lot of promotional content on Hart’s Instagram, showing off his new movies, stand-up shows, and even his new restaurant, My Hart House!
Ricky Gervias is also the most followed on Instagram, compared to the comedians in our UK list. Like Kevin Hart, he has a lot of promotions on his page, however, he also loves showing off his cat, Pickle!
Not all of our comedians have upcoming shows, but for the ones that do, we looked at which comedians were offering the most expensive tickets per person.
Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle take the top spot with a huge $141.70 ticket for their next show. The comedy pair are touring around Europe, going to England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The first of these shows will take place at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool, before they perform at the O2 Arena in London.
Joe Lycett takes the crown for the most expensive ticket at £47.30. His next three shows are sold out, therefore we looked at the show after these three which takes place on the 11th of September at the Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff. Lycett is known for his takes on consumer affairs, where he once re-named himself Hugo Boss as a protest against the fashion brand, Hugo Boss, who were sending small businesses a cease if they had the name ‘Boss’ in their company name.
We used Google to find out which of our comedians were being searched for the most. We looked at the past 24 months and totalled the number of times our comedians were searched for.
Pete Davidson takes the number one spot for the first time, with almost 100 million Google searches of his name. Davidson has been a regular feature in the news, after reportedly breaking up with his girlfriend, Kim Kardashian. Davidson’s comedy style is based on his own life experiences and aspects of his life.
Ricky Gervais takes the top spot once again with over 17 million searches over the last two years. One of Gervais’ recent projects was the third series of Afterlife - a Netflix series which has been incredibly successful after it’s initial release in 2019.
We looked to YouTube to find out which of our comedians had the highest number of views. We looked at clips of their stand-up, compilations of funny moments, and any sketches they did, using a sample of 10 videos. We then used this total to get an average per video.
Jordan Peele takes the top spot with a huge average of just over 29 million YouTube views. Peele’s sketches with Keegan-Michael Key have gone viral with several hilarious videos. One of their videos featured the character of a teacher who mispronounced his students’ names, which received over 200 million views. Peele has since turned his attention to directing, with titles including ‘Get Out’, ‘Us’ and his latest release, ‘Nope’.
Lee Mack takes the top spot for the first time with 2.7 million views on average. One of the videos in Mack’s sample was a compilation of his best moments on the show, Would I Lie to You, which received 18 million views.
We looked at all of the OECD countries and discovered who was the most searched comedian for both the US and the UK.
Pete Davidson takes the top spot again, with 29 different countries having him as the most searched-for comedian. Adam Sandler was second with six different countries searching for him the most. Jim Carrey and Chris Rock came out on top in some of the countries in our list.
Ricky Gervais takes the top spot for the final time, with 37 different countries having him as the most searched-for comedian. The only country which did not have Gervais at the top was Ireland, who were searching for Jimmy Carr more often.
We got our original lists from Wikipedia for both US and UK comedians before narrowing them down to around 20 per country.
We used Celebrity Net Worth to find out each comedian’s net worth.
We used Wikipedia to find out the number of TV/film/Netflix specials they had, including DVDs. For the specials, we only included the shows with the comedian’s name in the title.
We looked at their Twitter and Instagram accounts to discover the number of followers each comedian had.
We used Ticketmaster to find out the cheapest ticket for each comedian’s upcoming shows. We used only their next show, and the cheapest ticket available for that show to get our figures.
We used Google search data to find out the number of times their name had been searched for on Google, looking back at the last 24 months.
We used YouTube to find out the average number of views different clips of our comedians had received. We searched for the comedian’s name, followed by stand-up, and used clips of the comedian performing stand-up, compilations of their funny moments, as well as sketches they have performed. We looked at a sample of the top 10 results before creating an average of the total.
As not all of our comedians have upcoming shows or social media, the blank spaces in the table show this.
We then used this data to create a normalised score out of 10, which we then averaged to get our influencer score to determine which comedian was the most influential.
We also used Google search data to find the average number of monthly searches over the last year for each comedian looking specifically at 15 different countries, to determine the most popular in each country.
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