James Rose on the funniest Vines

Last week, the hugely talented and net-savvy comic Limmy produced a 30-minute compilation of all the Vine videos he has created since downloading the bite sized video-making app just a few weeks ago.

Not only is it by equal measure hilarious, disturbing, imaginative and juvenile, it’s unique. It’s difficult to see how and why something like this would ever have been produced before the application existed.

People who stumble across it will find it bemusing, but for the fans it’s a brilliant record of the Glaswegian genius’s minute-by-minute comic ideas. All put together in one lump like this, it’s a hell of a ride. If something like this had appeared on Channel 4 in the wee small hours in the 90s it would have scared the shit out of you.

That’s a rare thing in comedy today, even on the internet, where everybody’s clamouring for the next viral sensation. That often involves bandwagon jumping and blandness, rather than pieces of genuine originality or oddness.

Of course, half-hour compilations are not what the app was designed for. The publicity implores you to create ‘short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way’. It all sounds a bit sickening.

For a while there all I heard about Vine were grumbles about yet another piece of narcissistic social media clutter. It sounded like something young people did. Good looking people. Boring, then.

But then funny things started popping up on my twitter feed. Funny things from funny people. Initially just the silly bits of recorded ambience that you’d expect, but then fully-formed gags and mini-sketches. The first one I saw that made me appreciate what you could do with the medium was this piece of acenessfrom comedy writer Phillip Larkin. The first viral Vine to hit my consciousness was the classic ‘Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal, now turned into an extended cornflake-denying saga.

I hadn’t really appreciated that you could do so much with such a short space of time. Vine is brilliant for those comic ideas that occur fleetingly in life, and usually either vanish into the ether, or at the very most get scribbled down in a notebook for later evaluation. Stuff you wouldn’t even bother to make on a cameraphone and stick on YouTube, but that makes complete sense when embedded into a tweet.

It’s amazing how much of a story you can tell in any comedy format you like in those six tiny seconds. Like Twitter itself, it’s another example of how imposing limitations can free up minds to create great comedy. Like Twitter, it also seems to irritate a large amount of people, but I think that’s a shame.

My other top Vine makers are:

Darren Walsh Pun comic and Vinemaker. Favourite Vine

Will Sasso Canadian actor and comedian. Favourite Vine

Bo Burnham Frighteningly young and gifted American comedian. Favourite Vine

• James Rose @jimbobabu is a comedy writer for internet sketch show Hunka Wunda – but he doesn’t make Vines.

Published: 6 Aug 2013