Great Company with Jamie Laing
Munya Chawawa: Why Comedy Matters Right Now | GREAT MOMENTS
09 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello there, Ben Shepard here. And me, Joel Domets. So, Christmas is here and while you're wrapping gifts, it's time to wrap up your business goals too. If you want to know exactly how to prepare for your money resolutions before the end of the year and start January ahead of the game, listen to our podcast, The Businessman.
So grab a mulled wine, hit play and make this Christmas the start of your best business year yet. Search The Businessman wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube. Hello, everyone. I'm Jamie Lang, and this is Great Moments. Hey guys, welcome back to our great moments. Who do we have today? We have Munya Chihuahua.
Munya is the satirist and social media creator behind some of the sharpest and funniest social media content out there. He's a genius. He's the best. We also did Gogglebox together. So if you saw Gogglebox, you'd see us doing that together. Now in this great moment, we chat about how comedy can be one of the most powerful forms of communication. He certainly proves that.
And how humor helps us tackle difficult topics, challenge politics, question the society we live in, all those kind of things. It's a great episode and we hope you like it. And if you really like this little great moment, you can click on the full episode, which is in the show description. Just click on the link. Okay, you ready? Here we go. Enjoy this great moments with Munya Chihuahua.
Do you know what's so amazing about your careers? You leave Sheffield studying psychology. You decide that you want to go into this industry. But you were told, unless you had 30,000 followers, you probably wouldn't get an agent. So you went, right, I'm going to go and post a video twice a week on my social media. So you made a video twice a week.
I think it was four years or something until one of them really popped off. Yes. So first of all, to get in that room, I would lie to agents saying that I was Idris Elba's son in the email. LAUGHTER In the email. And then oftentimes either they would figure out it was a joke and go, okay, you got me. Like, this is quite interesting. Come in. I want to meet you.
Or they'll be like, you know, they would believe I was his son. So I get in there on this one occasion and they're like, look, we really liked your email. It was very smart what you did. Watched your showreel. It was good. You've got, you know, you've got charisma, you've got what it takes, but how many followers do you have? And I was like, oh, I don't know, like 2000. They went, no, no, no.
If you have 30,000 followers, maybe we would have connected you to someone in the digital team. So I mentioned this because it's a very important, uh, it's very important within the dissection of what the term influencer means, for example, right? I slightly have beef with the term because I think in many cases it disguises a person's actual talent or skill, right?
This is less in reference to me. It's more in terms of my peers even. What do you mean by that? So what I mean by it is this. In press...
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Chapter 2: What makes comedy a powerful form of communication?
you know okay so thus far in when i have been reviewed in the press or whatever oftentimes journalists will steer away from calling me a comedian or a satirist even though that's predominantly what i do you know i've been called a youtuber despite the fact that i rarely put anything on youtuber on youtube when i went on bake off they described me as a podcaster i don't even have a podcast jamie you know how mad that is i don't even have a podcast it's
I've been called a rapper, even though rap is sometimes what I do within my satire. And I think, okay, and of course I've been called an influencer, which is interesting to me. Influencer, in people's minds, is somebody whose only skill is being popular, right? That's what the term is used to imply. It's like, oh, you're just a popular person. Mm-hmm.
Chapter 3: How does Munya Chawawa define the role of humor in society?
However, to gain popularity, especially now, surely requires oftentimes some sort of skill to be amazing at cooking or music or dancing or something, to actually entice an audience to go, oh my God, that's amazing. I want to invest in that. I want to follow in that.
And so, you know, what we're really talking about is what does a person do beneath the label of influencer that we are not calling them? So... You know, for example, there's a, there's a girl called, I think Poppy Cooks who, you know, her specialism is recipes involving potatoes and she is sick. She can do a million and one things, but people call an influencer. She's a chef.
She was a chef before she would make a potato as well. She's a chef now, call her a chef. Ditto with a musician, ditto with a dancer, with whatever. Just because oftentimes the only reason people want followers is so that they are then afforded the opportunities to do the things they want to do.
The only thing that ever made me want followers is an agent saying, you can't present until you have followers. If she had said to me in that moment, you can present, I would have done it without followers. See what I'm saying? The only thing that gave me a desire to be popular is being told it is a prerequisite to do the thing you want to do and love to do.
So the term is slightly reductionist in that it actually buries the talent that somebody has used to acquire their audience. And also, you know, we have to say that if anyone had if someone said to you, I'm going to do a show in a minute and there's going to be 10,000 people there, you'd be like, bloody hell, like, who are you? That's incredible.
Those are the kind of numbers that people are building every day behind their talent. And so it's worth actually giving it its dues and saying, cool, what is it you do? And I want to acknowledge you for that. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes total sense.
But again, it goes back to that same sort of thing that we like to put people in some sort of box because it's easier for us to articulate it then. You know, you are a comedian and your videos are so smart. When I first did Radio 1, I don't think you even know this, but I can't wait to tell you.
In Radio 1, because it's a very live show, as you know, it's every day, people are constantly thinking on their toes of what to talk about and what to do. The producer at the time would say, right, let's go and check out Munya's social media. He'll tell us what's going on. He's like, guys. So they would go and check out what you were talking about. Right, right.
To use that kind of vibe to help with what kind of conversation we should have on Radio 1. Oh, that's crazy. Without you realizing, I think, you're influencing so many people because you're spreading information in an entertaining way. Mm. which is actually what people really want to engage with. That's why podcasting is quite a good thing.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do influencers face in their careers?
are going to get the sort of comments. Not you as the comedian or individual, it's SNL. Because it's on your own personal page, it's about you. So there has to be a slight combination between, okay, I've got this big following.
Am I worried now I'm going to alienate some people because then maybe people stop liking me, but also I want to produce content that sparks this conversation and I want to do stuff that I think is right. So it must be a hard kind of road to follow. There's a very good point about the SNL thing.
You know, maybe I would, if there was an SNL here, maybe I would have never started to make my own things. But in relation to what you're saying, if I make a video and people unfollow me because they don't like what I am, you know, what I'm, the message I'm putting in the video, there's a few things to consider. First of all,
As an innate psychologist and also as a satirist, what I believe my role is, is to often reflect how we are feeling together, how most of us are feeling. Same way as a political cartoonist will often do. You know, I love Ben Jennings, who, you know, if you've not seen him, you can check him out. He's like sort of similar age to me. He does really bang on the money political cartoons.
And his job is even harder than mine because he needs to, in a single image, capture everything. And I just think he's just totally incredible. I'm, I'm, I'm studying constantly how people feel before I, I load up the bone arrow. Right. So when I take the shot, I already know by and large, I'm trying to encapsulate how many people are feeling, right?
As opposed to just putting out something that I know is going to alienate people, if that makes sense. So that's the first thing. Number two, I check every video I send to my manager and I send to the same group of friends to number one, ask, is this funny? Number two, is this inoffensive? And when I say inoffensive, what I mean is, I don't want to hurt anyone. I'm not a malicious person.
It's not in my interest to cause any form of harm to anyone. And I care more about not harming people than I do being liked, if that makes sense. And that translates as, I could have a video that I think is hilarious and I don't care if people are hurt by it and I just put it out. I'm never going to do that. I'm always going to check first. That's the second layer of defense.
Thirdly, if a video goes out and someone goes, look, I'm going to follow you because I don't like what you're saying about Rishi Sunak and I don't like what you're saying about Russell Brand and I really like Andrew Tate. That's fine. I'm not in a race to become the most followed person.
All I want to do is leave a body of work that was challenging and that meant something and that inspired some sort of change. That's all that matters to me. Do you think humor and satire is a good vehicle to land a message? Of course. It's like this phrase, I think I must have invented it by now. It's like putting the medicine in the lasagna, right? Hard to say. If I said, do you want lasagna?
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