We’ve all been there. You sit down for a quick scroll, and before you know it, you’ve lost an hour to TikTok recipes you’ll never cook, celebrity gossip you don’t care about, and conspiracy theories that make flat-earthers look sensible.
Comedian Iain Stirling knows that feeling all too well. In fact, he’s been talking about it ahead of his new Comedy Central series, Roast The Internet, a show that dives headfirst into the chaos of online culture and unapologetically rips it apart.
Launching 1st September, the eight-part series is pitched as “the hilarious televised group chat we all need.” Each week, Stirling is joined by some of the country’s sharpest comics to take aim at the weirdest corners of the web — and it’s every bit as savage as you’d hope.
Comedy Central gives Stirling free rein
This isn’t Stirling’s first time on Comedy Central. You might have caught him on Growing Pains or his stand-up special back in 2019. But this time he’s front and centre with his own hour-long show.
“Comedy Central have been amazing because they’re one of the few places making comedian-led content at the minute,” he says. “It’s an hour-long programme which doesn’t happen very often either in our world, to be given that amount of time and that amount of freedom to make something that genuinely, I’m really proud of. If it wasn’t an hour long, we wouldn’t be able to have five-minute stand-up sets from, like, Katherine Ryan, which have been written for the show, and there’s all these really cool bits of the show we can have.”
The weird clips that live rent-free in his head
If you’re wondering what counts as internet insanity, Stirling has receipts. He admits he’s “bandwagon-jumped” on plenty of trends, with Jet2 holiday memes ranking high on his guilty-pleasure list. “The Jet2 holiday music over just disastrous holiday footage will never not be funny,” he grins.
He’s also slightly bemused when the viral waves crash into Hollywood: “It’s sort of mad, that’s the funny thing, when we’re doing Jeff Goldblum getting involved in Jet2 Holidays!”
As for the clip that lives rent-free in his head? “Two Scottish girls who are doing a performance, and the mum walks in and asks which one of them’s gone to the toilet and not flushed it, and she says it in a very Scottish-mum kind of way.”
Yes, he actually threw up for a joke
The show isn’t just desk-based commentary. There are also challenges inspired by the internet’s stranger side. Some are silly, some are gross, and one in particular nearly broke Stirling.
“We saw this trend where you get those inflatable animal suits that people wear, and you spray this really stinky fart spray into the suit. We did it on the show, and I basically had to take an hour to bin the clothes I was wearing under the suit, go for a shower and throw up because it was literally unbearable, so I think if that makes it in, that was pretty wild.”
Not every comedian would put their body on the line for a joke, but Stirling seems proud of suffering for the bit.
Of course, making a show about online behaviour forces Stirling to reflect on how many hours he spends trying to finish the internet. “Too many, like three or four, I reckon, which is really bad, isn’t it? Really bad, but also probably not that bad in the grand scheme of things, either, which is even more worrying. It’s sort of scary. You’ll get emails saying ‘you’ve been tagged in something,’ but you’ll never get shown the thing you’ve been tagged in. You have to click to open the app to find it. They’re selling your attention.
“Someone said to me once, ‘if a product’s free, then you’re the product,’ so I have got that in the back of my head now.”
That doesn’t stop him from falling into the same traps as the rest of us. “I’m a millennial, so what I do is I don’t go onto TikTok, I watch TikToks three months later on Instagram reels like a grown-up. My family went to Ireland a day earlier than me, so I had the night to myself, and I was going to watch a film, and I literally sat on my phone, and the next thing I knew, I’d sunk two hours. I sat in my living room in front of my expensive 55-inch TV, looking at my phone!”
Why planking deserves a comeback
Despite the show’s takedowns, Stirling has a soft spot for the dumb trends of his own youth. He thinks it’s “pathetic” that kids now focus on slick dances and curated Instagram posts instead of the pure chaos of planking.
“I don’t think people plank nearly enough these days, and I think kids on nights out should be planking on water features and fences. They should be hammered in a pair of G-Star jeans, planking on a wall like we did in the noughties. And taking about a hundred pictures to put up on Facebook. Wake up the next morning, and the hungover job for that day was Domino’s pizza and untagging the pictures.”
While Roast the Internet is packed with clips, sketches and gags, Stirling insists there’s more to it than just a televised meme-fest.
“This isn’t a show where we’re just like ‘haha look at this funny clip from the internet’, we’re also like ‘look at the way the internet is used, look at what it’s doing to our psyches, look at what it’s doing to our personalities. It’s all very much like You’ve Been Framed style clips, which are great, and we obviously have in the show, but we also have really interesting hot takes and ideas about how the internet can be a better and more useful place.”
From Katherine Ryan’s brilliant send-up of “mumfluencers” to Joe Thomas channelling his inner grumpy old man about the internet’s needless complexity, the guest line-up brings plenty of variety. “Everyone had a different angle, but they were sort of complementary,” Stirling says.
So, is Stirling worried about backlash from the very online audience he’s skewering? Not really. His aim is simple: make it funny, make it relatable, and maybe make viewers think twice about their next doomscroll session.
“What I’m genuinely hoping for is they find it really, really funny and really accessible. I am genuinely really proud of it, it is an actual topical takedown of the internet in maybe a more critical level than television has done before.”
Iain Stirling’s Roast The Internet airs on Comedy Central UK
from 1st September, with new episodes weekly.
He is the founder of Huff Media, publisher of Professional Pickup, Professional Van, Average Janes, Average Joes, and CALIBRE. His work focuses primarily on light commercial vehicles, pickups, and real-world vehicle use, with much of his time spent on manufacturer launches, industry events, and long-term vehicle testing.
This Lego Renault 5 Turbo 3E looks good enough to become a real set