Cody Dahler sits on a strange plane of celebrity. The civil servant-turned-comedian has more than two million followers on Instagram, almost a million on TikTok, and more than 100,000 subscribers to his podcast, The Truth (In My Opinion). “I’m social media famous, I suppose,” he says, over an egregiously priced pint at The Maple Leaf pub in London’s Covent Garden. “But there’s next to no chance of us getting papped. Don’t worry.”
Dahler’s niche is political comedy for people who might otherwise avoid politics. He takes the stories dominating the news and explains them through sketches and impersonations. Posing as a beleaguered Reform UK press secretary, he says, is one of his favourite bits to do.
All of this has resulted in an unusual kind of recognition for the 30-year-old, who quit the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2022 to join the BBC’s writing pool for Radio 4 shows including the News Quiz and Dead Ringers. Then a video of Dahler discussing politics while wearing a boob tube went viral and convinced him to focus on his own channel. He could have chased the “relative stability” of a staff writing job with the BBC, he reflects, but instead going freelance has, for all its initial difficulty, brought greater success and more control over his career. Now, plenty of people know Dahler as the guy whose videos they watch to find out what’s going in the world, without necessarily knowing his name.
Part of the appeal lies in the promise that whatever the subject—first-past-the-post voting, corruption at Fifa, taxation, or the British egg industry—it will be broken down in a way that will not make them feel stupid. “The aim has always been to explain politics, or culture, in a way that feels accessible and relevant,” he says.
And this idea will form the basis of Dahler’s first book, The State of This! A Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb’s Guide to British Politics, which will be published in November. The title comes from Dahler’s catchphrase, an oddly old-fashioned calling card for a modern comedian, which satirises the fear of admitting you don’t understand something, particularly in front of your friends.
Political apathy, says Dahler, is less common than the “media class” might suggest. “My experience is that actually people do care, very much, about politics, and the impact of policies on their lives.” But too often, Dahler notes, journalists use “big words” that cloud important issues. I call this “obfuscation”. “See,” he says, “you just did it.”
Yet Dahler does not wish to position himself as an alternative to journalism. “All of my content leans on brilliant journalists,” he admits. Dahler’s role, as he sees it, is to make that work comprehensible for viewers who might not be seeking it out for themselves. At the very least, he aims to give them a peripheral awareness “while also hopefully making them laugh”.
A problem, in Dahler’s view, is that too much political communication is based on assumed knowledge. “When I was growing up, I read and heard the word ‘austerity’ hundreds of times without really understanding what it meant. I think the media has got to meet people where they are.”
Dahler argues that newspapers and magazines need to adapt not just where they publish their journalism, but how they convey it. “Simply transferring an existing format to a phone screen doesn’t necessarily make it suited to social media: delivery, performance and presentation matter, too,” he says.
He suggests political discourse may progress “if traditional media outlets took social media more seriously… there’s this tendency to view social media as a hotbed of misinformation, which it absolutely is. But it’s also important to recognise that it can be used as a tool to inform people in a new and interesting way.”
There is an element of gallows humour to Dahler’s work. The subjects are often grim, and the jokes acknowledge that. But, moving onto his second pint, he says he is more optimistic than his material might suggest. “My comedy comes from a place of frustration,” he says, “but also [from] a genuinely optimistic belief that if enough people learn about these injustices, we will be able to stop them.”
The State of This! A Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb’s Guide to British Politics by Cody Dahler will be published on 5th November 2026 (Blink)
