The Best Comedy Shorts of April 2024

Each month, many funny videos are posted to every corner of the internet — from Twitter and Instagram to Vimeo and sometimes other weird places we’ll have trouble embedding. Because you’re busy living your life, you might miss some of these funny videos and feel left out when others bring them up in conversation. Well, worry not! We’re here to make sure you’re not listening in on conversations but leading them … as long as those conversations are about funny internet videos. Here, our favorite comedy shorts of the month.

We don’t just post short videos on here, people. YouTuber Joel Haver made a whole movie for $2,500. It’d be impressive if it were made for 100 times that amount. A mix of early-Curb ultrareal riffing and Duplass ingenuity, Anyone Else But Me is far better than it deserves to be. In fact, it’s very good.

Di Poi’s short cartoons for Bento Box often feature this character, a verbose child who possesses a scrunched-up man-face and, in this case, responds to childhood’s indignities with the passive-aggressive argumentativeness of a friendless co-worker. Di Poi’s designs are always grotesque and fun, but it’s the choppy rhythms of his performance that are particularly appealing.

There’s something hilariously simple about a garden gnome possessed by Satan. Seemingly first thought, the gnome’s evil little voice really gets us going. We would like to see more of him. Not sure what that says about how we’re doing.

With no dialogue and an inspired visual palette achieved on what we can only assume is a modest budget, Flappy taps into the small space between cute and horrifying in the anthropomorphic, while altogether avoiding the alluring pitfall of “going silly.”

Willett’s droll wit is on full display in her new special, Loopholes, now available to stream. In this clip, she gets some unwelcome and, as a white woman from California, redundant advice from her therapist about how the stars might be able to help with her depression. “This lady cost 60 bucks,” she says, “which was cheap for therapy, but, you know, expensive for a horoscope.”

Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, goes deep on the lingering mysteries surrounding the setting of Ben Affleck’s 2010 crime film, The Town. Specifically: In which city does it take place? If you haven’t considered this question before, Pargin will peel away a layer of reality to reveal a whole new movie. If you’ve spent the past 14 years trying to decipher this as well, Pargin has created an invaluable tool to help you explain it all to the uninitiated.

Simple Town prepares for a screening at Manhattan’s Roxy Cinema (located under the swanky Roxy Hotel) by staying there for three weeks free of charge — not at the hotel, but at the cinema itself, though the comedians are granted some provisions from the hotel bar to divide among themselves. The lap of luxury doesn’t end up being what they expected, but we’re certainly big enough fans of Simple Town that we hope at least their screening went well and they got another omelet for the road.

Vaynblat has long been a New York comedy-scene mainstay and an endlessly fresh, inventive, and rewarding voice, and her debut stand-up special, We’re All Dads Here, should cement this reputation for a broader audience. Filmed at Union Hall and available in its entirety on YouTube, the special sees Vaynblat confronting the realities of aging into her 30s and reconnecting with her Russian heritage. She always comes across with the confidence and charming humility of someone who has organically found themself the center of attention at a party and takes that responsibility seriously.

Alterman continues to be one of the most daring and effectively subversive sketch comedians out there. Many try to reinvent the form, but few succeed in actually surprising audiences. And then there’s Harold. He deserves more followers.

The busy urban bar is the great equalizer in terms of social class. Everyone is welcome, and no one judges — especially the bartender. When one enters, one is met with quick, friendly service and feels no need to ingratiate oneself unnecessarily so that one may be feel as though one’s anything more than a feather on a stool, floating aimlessly through an existence that never seemed to plan on having one in it at all. Again, inside a bar, one feels absolutely no need to do this.

Like what you saw? Want to be on this monthly roundup? Show us your stuff! 

Luke Kelly-Clyne is a co-head of HartBeat Independent and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours at @LKellyClyne.

Graham Techler has contributed writing to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Send him your videos at @gr8h8m_t3chl3r.