Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: Paid Vacation Comedy
Instagram: 288K Followers
Youtube: 85K Subscribers
What Is Paid Vacation Comedy?
Paid Vacation Comedy brings together stand-up Zac Townsend and Ali Shahriari, the writer/director behind years of viral sketch work with Zebra Corner.
Paid Vacation combines their two instincts. The account moves through fake commercials, workplace sketches, news, social satire, and recurring characters without depending on one performer or one format. The videos are written for the camera from the beginning rather than feeling like stand-up premises that happened to get filmed.
The parodies have also started reaching the people on the other side of the joke. Their Waffle House training video traveled well beyond the page, while a Kill Tony parody made its way to Tony Hinchcliffe and the show before Townsend eventually appeared there himself.
More recently, Paid Vacation has started giving some of those ideas more room.
COOKED is their new scripted restaurant comedy built around line cooks and the particular insanity of working in a kitchen. Instead of starting over with a new world every time they post, Townsend and Shahriari now have a workplace and characters they can keep returning to.
They are trying something completely different with My Pants, Your Pants. Paid Vacation asked followers to send in stories about the last time they pooped their pants and received more than 10,000 submissions. Townsend and producer Taylor Brown turned those voicemails into a podcast.
That response says quite a bit about the community they have built. Ten thousand people were willing to call a hotline and voluntarily tell Paid Vacation one of the more humiliating stories of their lives.
There is also a Patreon, merchandise, and live work around the account. Paid Vacation began with short sketches and parodies. Now one idea becomes a scripted series, another becomes a podcast, and the audience is starting to become part of what gets made.
Three Things We Love About Paid Vacation Comedy
They know the format they are parodying: The Waffle House training video, commercial spoofs, fake news, and Kill Tony game all work because Paid Vacation understands the thing well enough to reproduce its language before breaking it.
The two creators bring different skills: Townsend comes from stand-up and joke writing. Shahriari spent years making web sketches with Zebra Corner. Paid Vacation gets both the premise and the visual execution.
They are giving the sketches somewhere to grow: COOKED creates a recurring workplace, while My Pants, Your Pants turned an audience prompt into its own show. The page is starting to produce formats that can live longer than one upload.