Yahoo Lifestyle It’s Almost Friday! How Meme Account Friday Beers Recruited Creators, Built a Studio and Became the Future of Comedy
Will Angus was stuck at home in Texas during the pandemic, his finance degree from TCU less valuable than a roll of toilet paper. So, to pass the time, he posted funny videos online. “I always wanted to be in comedy,” Angus says. “But I felt like a freak for thinking I could do something like that.”
One day, he received an offer to come to L.A. to make sketches for a faceless Instagram meme page. “I had to have that moment with my parents, like, ‘I’ve been making TikToks during COVID. I’m moving to L.A.,’” Angus recalls as he sits in a dimly lit booth in a Manhattan mezcal bar, opposite a few of his comedy collaborators and his boss, Jack Barrett, who created the account.
“Jerry Seinfeld had a great bit where he said telling his family he wanted to be a stand-up comedian was like coming out of the closet. This was harder,” Angus deadpans, winding his buddies up with laughter. “It’s something gay people could never understand.”
The group is giddy, reuniting in New York over chips, guacamole and lots of margaritas to share how they went from bored college grads posting funny videos to becoming the faces of a fledging digital brand called Almost Friday Media, which has evolved into a bona fide media empire producing short-form series, podcasts and newsletters.
With the goal of making the type of irreverent bro comedy that has slipped off the big screen, they distribute content directly through social media and YouTube, amassing a larger audience than most TV shows. Almost Friday’s office in Venice functions like a television studio while avoiding the town’s red tape. Still, Hollywood has come knocking on its door.
Barrett, a scruffy 34-year-old with a subtle surfer drawl, launched Almost Friday with his younger brothers, Max, 33, and Sam, 28. In 2019, he was working at the New York-based production company RadicalMedia, and Max was at an ad agency in Los Angeles. “We were doing creative jobs but not making the content we wanted to make,” Barrett says.
So that year, they began posting sketches online under the name 27 Comedy, racking up a few thousand followers on Instagram. They hoped to break into Hollywood, writing one television script per month as the Barrett Brothers. “We wanted to be the guys who made the next ‘Arrested Development’ or ‘South Park,’ who wrote the next ‘Old School,’” Barrett says.
But it was the meme account they made on the side that started gaining traction. The videos were fratty, intentionally immature and simple: The Barretts would rip movie clips or sports highlights and overlay new text. An early example: A quarterback labeled “Thanksgiving bender” narrowly jukes an opponent called “Family time” before celebrating in the end zone with a teammate named “Friday beers.” That phrase became a mantra for getting through life with friends and looking forward to the weekend.
As the account grew from 5,000 followers to 250,000 in just a couple months, it caught the attention of Andrew Kenward, an agent in WME’s digital media department who represented male-skewing talent like Chad & JT, the Nelk Boys and Matty Matheson. Watching young audiences gravitate toward social media content, he and Barrett saw a future in which these beer memes could be a “seedling for a bigger ecosystem.”
Kenward became Almost Friday’s agent — and later left WME to become president of the company, helping evolve it into a lifestyle brand that not only makes videos and podcasts but also sells clothing and games. “We’re mimicking the structure of a traditional studio,” Kenward says. “We’re just doing it on the back of Instagram and TikTok and podcasts and YouTube instead of cable, film and radio.”
When it came time to expand the business in 2021, the Barretts looked no further than their Instagram and TikTok “For You” pages. They hired the funniest creators that popped across their algorithms, starting with Angus and the stand-up comic Liam Cullagh. Soon after came Chester Collins and Billy Langdon (roommates in New York making funny videos while working remote finance jobs), Groundlings performer Eilise Patton, and Will Donnellon, who owes his career in comedy to being rejected by the Peace Corps (“They sent me a letter that listed all the shit that’s wrong with me”).
“They assembled a boy band of TikTok comedians,” Collins says.
To be their de facto showrunner, Almost Friday brought in Tyler Falbo, with whom Barrett had developed the ill-fated “Are You My Boy?” — a “Bachelor”-type competition series that jockeyed bros rather than babes. The content arm of the company runs like a network TV show. On a typical Monday, the talent brings in scripts and pitches ideas; Tuesdays and Wednesdays they have preproduction meetings; Thursdays are for filming.
The sketches start with a universal experience — like leaving a group chat, trying to break out of the “friend zone,” accidentally selecting “meet at door” on UberEats — and then devolve into high-concept absurdity. “If you have to describe the channel,” says Falbo, “it’s ‘How do you take a small, dumb thing that we all experience in our lives and make it feel as consequential as possible?’”
In one video, a guy accidentally scrolls dangerously deep on a crush’s Instagram page, triggering a hazmat team to break into his apartment and safely exit the app as if defusing a bomb. In another, getting stuck in conversation with the annoying guy at a party turns into an “Under the Skin”-meets-“Get Out”-style purgatory.
Almost Friday’s core demographic — its audience is 86% male and 83% ages 21-34 — closely resembles that of controversial digital media juggernaut Barstool Sports. And while their content has certain subjects in common — drinking, sports, women — Almost Friday is quick to distance itself from the toxic aspects of bro humor. “In contrast with a lot of the other male-focused content hubs on the internet, Almost Friday is more vulnerable than macho, as far as its point of view,” Kenward says.
“We’re always self-deprecating, never making fun of other people,” adds Barrett. “That way of talking about being together and loving your friends is the opposite of the divisiveness and punching-down humor we saw elsewhere.”
Almost Friday’s comedic sensibility draws from ’80s raunch comedies and early-aughts Frat Pack films. “A lot of the great classic movies — ‘National Lampoon,’ ‘Animal House,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Happy Gilmore,’ ‘Wedding Crashers’ — that stuff can’t be made now because it hasn’t always aged well,” says Barrett.
But the genre’s extinction has left a generation of “young guys growing up” without their own cinematic canon. Average dudes in their early 20s are “underserved by entertainment,” Barrett says, and as a result, they’ve drifted toward online reactionary comedy with right-leaning audiences.
“There hasn’t been a truly great comedy movie since ‘The Hangover,’” Barrett argues. He wants to rekindle the spirit of that film while making sure “everybody is invited to the party.” (That party is not only online: The company opened a bar in Nashville in 2022 and launched a separate enterprise, Friday Beers, that sells canned lager.)
Over the past couple years, Almost Friday’s sketch and short-form material has reached more than 123 million views on YouTube, which, Barrett and Kenward point out, is by far America’s most popular streaming service.
YouTube also allows Almost Friday to tack its own ads on the end of videos, which pay for the sketches and then some. Barrett estimates that 65% of the company’s revenue comes from digital advertising and brand deals on YouTube, social media and podcasts. “If we got offered to make a sketch show for Netflix, I don’t even know if we should do that,” Falbo says. “YouTube is actually the best place for these sketches. Even though you want that stamp of approval, I don’t think we should do it.”
Still, Angus says, “For all of us, the North Star is TV and movies.”
In alignment with that goal, Almost Friday has signed deals with various studios and streamers to bring its ideas into long-form projects. Two years ago, the company sold an ensemble sitcom to Hulu titled “Almost Friday,” about four friends fighting eviction. And it’s working with Danny McBride’s Rough House Pictures to produce a television pilot centered on its short-form character Royce du Pont, a cross between Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson that skewers the alpha-male archetype. The show will be in mockumentary format, “like David Attenborough being hired to document Gary Vee,” Langdon teases.
Almost Friday has also sold unscripted series to both Netflix and Hulu, and an original movie to Hulu. (Netflix and Hulu declined to comment.) The comedians, actors and writers behind the company are constantly selling larger projects to studios, although nothing has yet crossed the finish line.
With the ability to produce content cheaply and distribute it directly to audiences, Barrett and company have an aversion to Hollywood gridlock. Why spend years in development hell when you could just make the thing yourself? “People see what works online, where content is being consumed, and they say, ‘Can my network have a bite of that?’” Barrett says. “The answer is yes and no. You can if you’re decisive.”
So if Hollywood wants to continue to linger outside the party, that’s OK with Almost Friday. The company has just three words: Hold my beer.
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