Humor is a major reason people watch, follow, and share social media content. The available research spans early online-video behavior, U.S. platform use, meme attitudes, and teen time spent on social networks. Together, these findings show how comedy functions as entertainment, identity, and a route to public attention.
Contents
- Humorous video consumption
- Who watches and shares funny videos
- TikTok and entertainment culture
- Humor across followed accounts
- Memes, identity, and brand expectations
- Political humor and public awareness
- Time, motivations, and audience context
Humorous video consumption
Pew Research Center’s 2007 online-video research provides an early benchmark for comedy on the internet. At that time, 31% of internet users had watched or downloaded comedic or humorous videos online, while 7% had done so on a typical day. The distinction matters: a large group had encountered humor at least once, but daily behavior was much less common.
The same Pew Research Center study found that humorous video viewing varied substantially by age. Fifty-six percent of young adult internet users had watched humorous online videos. The figure was 29% among internet users ages 30–49, 17% among those ages 50–64, and 12% among internet users ages 65 and older. These are historical online-video measurements from 2007, not current estimates of social-platform behavior.
The 2007 figures also showed a gender difference in reported comedy-video use. Thirty-eight percent of online men had watched or downloaded comedy video, compared with 25% of online women. On a typical day, 9% of male internet users watched or downloaded humorous video content, versus 5% of female internet users. The daily figures were therefore lower for both groups than the broader “ever watched” measures.
By 2013, Pew Research Center reported that 58% of online adults watched comedy or humorous videos. The comparison figures were 50% for music videos, 50% for educational videos, and 56% for how-to videos. This places humor alongside several established online-video categories, while the 58% figure made comedy the largest of the listed categories in that research.
Who watches and shares funny videos
The 2013 Pew Research Center findings also examined people who post videos online. Fifty-eight percent of adults who post videos online uploaded family-and-friends clips of everyday things. Fifty-six percent posted videos of themselves or others doing funny things, making humor nearly as common as ordinary personal documentation in this group.
Other posting behaviors were less frequent. Fifty-four percent posted videos of events they attended, 30% posted educational or tutorial videos they made, and 23% posted videos they intentionally staged, scripted, or choreographed. These measures describe the share of adult video posters engaging in each behavior, not the share of all internet users.
Viral reach was an explicit goal for some creators. Thirty-five percent of adults who post and share online videos had posted a video hoping it would be widely viewed or go viral. Pew Research Center reported that this equaled 11% of all online adults. The two figures use different denominators: one describes video posters, while the other describes the broader online-adult population.
For video consumption, social networking sites were already central in the 2013 research. Fifty-eight percent of online video consumers watched videos on social networking sites such as Facebook. This connects the social environment with video discovery, even though the study’s category was broader than humor alone.
| 2013 online-video measure | Share | Population described |
|---|---|---|
| Watched comedy or humorous videos | 58% | Online adults |
| Watched how-to videos | 56% | Online adults |
| Watched educational videos | 50% | Online adults |
| Watched music videos | 50% | Online adults |
| Posted funny videos | 56% | Adults who post videos |
| Hoped a posted video would go viral | 35% | Adults who post and share videos |
TikTok and entertainment culture
More recent Pew Research Center findings show entertainment as a dominant reason for TikTok use in the United States. In 2024, 95% of U.S. adult TikTok users said entertainment was a reason they used TikTok. That result does not mean every user used TikTok only for entertainment, but it does show how broadly entertainment fits into the platform’s appeal.
Pew Research Center’s 2026 TikTok facts reported that 59% of U.S. adults under 30 used TikTok, compared with 44% of adults ages 30–49, 30% of adults ages 50–64, and 12% of adults ages 65 and older. Age remains an important context when interpreting the potential audience for humorous short-form content.
Among U.S. adults overall, TikTok use rose across the reported years: 21% used TikTok in 2021, 33% used it in 2023, and 37% used it in 2025. Pew Research Center also reported that 68% of U.S. teens ages 13–17 used TikTok, and roughly 20% visited or used TikTok almost constantly. These statistics refer to U.S. audiences and should not be treated as global platform shares.
The entertainment connection is also visible in the accounts adults follow. In 2024, 59% of accounts followed by U.S. adult TikTok users posted about pop culture and entertainment. Thirty-six percent posted humorous or comedic content, while 37% posted made-for-social-media music, dance, or lip-sync performances. These categories can overlap, so their percentages should not be added together.
Humor across followed accounts
Pew Research Center found that 38% of accounts followed by U.S. adult TikTok users were personal accounts that posted infrequently, if ever. In contrast, 10% posted about political or social issues, and 5% posted news events, current events, or breaking news. The pattern suggests that followed-account environments include a large personal layer alongside entertainment and public-affairs content.
The categories also intersect. Forty-three percent of followed TikTok accounts that discussed politics or current events also discussed entertainment and pop culture. Just over one-third of those political or current-events accounts also posted humorous content. Humor is therefore not limited to accounts defined primarily as comedy; it can appear alongside news, politics, and cultural commentary.
For writers and creators, the practical lesson is that comedy can be a format or tone as well as a subject. A post may be about entertainment, current events, or everyday life while still using a humorous framing. The research supports that overlap, but it does not establish that humor causes higher reach or engagement.
Memes, identity, and brand expectations
GWI reported that over three-quarters of consumers who engage with memes find them funny. The finding describes meme-engaged consumers, so it should not be read as the opinion of every social media user.
Among Gen Z, shared humor was ranked 45% higher than similar cultural background as a point of identification. Shared humor was ranked 67% higher than speaking the same language. Gen Z consumers were also 19% more likely than the average consumer to identify with people who liked the same things as them on social media.
These comparisons frame humor as a social signal. A joke can communicate group membership without requiring identical background or language. That does not make every joke universally understandable; instead, it indicates that shared taste and shared humor can be meaningful markers of affiliation for this audience.
GWI also reported that brands were 18% more likely to be expected to be funny by young consumers. This is an expectation measure, not a recommendation that every brand use comedy. It suggests that audiences may judge a brand’s tone partly through whether its social content feels entertaining and culturally aware.
Political humor and public awareness
Pew Research Center’s 2022 research on Twitter users measured how often users encountered several kinds of public-affairs content. Thirty-one percent said they saw news articles about political or social issues almost every time they used the site. Sixteen percent said they saw political memes almost every time, and 15% said they saw humorous videos referencing political or social issues almost every time.
The figures show that political humor was a regular experience for a notable minority of Twitter users, although it was less commonly reported than seeing news articles. Twenty-four percent of Twitter users said the platform was a very effective way to raise public awareness about political or social issues.
These results do not measure whether political jokes changed opinions, increased knowledge, or produced action. They measure reported exposure and perceived effectiveness. For social-media writing, that distinction is important: visibility of a humorous post is not the same as persuasion.
Time, motivations, and audience context
GWI reported that Gen Z spent around three hours a day on social media, equal to 41% of their overall online time. Gallup separately found that 51% of U.S. teenagers spent at least four hours per day on social media. Gallup’s reported average for U.S. teens was 4.8 hours per day across seven platforms.
Gallup also found age and gender differences within its U.S. teen measure. Thirteen-year-olds spent an average of 4.1 hours per day on social media, compared with 5.8 hours for 17-year-olds. Girls averaged 5.3 hours per day, versus 4.4 hours for boys. These figures come from a different research program and population than GWI’s Gen Z estimate, so they should not be combined into one average.
GWI’s historical motivation data adds context. Time spent on social media increased from 1 hour 41 minutes in 2014 to 2 hours 15 minutes in 2018. In the tracked dataset, 27% of social media users used social media to find entertaining content in 2018, while 17% used it to fill spare time. Forty-one percent used it to stay in touch, and 41% used it to stay up to date with news.
Motivations changed unevenly. GWI found that staying in touch with friends’ activity decreased by 28% since 2014, while finding funny or entertaining content remained a core use case. More purposeful activities, such as researching and finding products to buy, increased as a usage motivator by 26%.
Brand-following behavior was stable in the reported comparison: 41% of social media users in the tracked audience groups liked or followed a brand on a social network in Q4 2015, and the figure was also 41% in Q4 2018. That stability sits alongside the continued importance of entertainment, suggesting that humorous content can share space with practical, commercial, social, and news-related reasons for using social media.