- Why most hashtag advice for comedy content is out of date
- What works: three categories, not one list
- A worked example: the "Office Mishaps" page
- The step most people skip: test in batches, not one at a time
- The hashtags that keep showing up as reliable for funny videos
- What to avoid, and the uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say
- Where hashtags cross over with other formats
- Frequently asked questions
- Sources worth reading
The short version: for funny Instagram videos, the hashtags that move the needle are mid-size niche tags (50,000 to 500,000 posts), format-specific tags like #skitcomedy or #officehumour, and a small handful of branded or community tags you repeat on every post so Instagram learns what you are. Generic tags like #funny, #comedy and #lol are so saturated they do almost nothing, and the bigger truth most hashtag posts skip is that hashtags now influence discovery far less than sound, watch time and shares do.
Why most hashtag advice for comedy content is out of date
A lot of what gets written about hashtags for funny videos was true in 2019, when Instagram's search and tagging system worked more like a filing cabinet. You picked a tag, Instagram filed your video under it, people browsing that tag found you. That system still exists, but it is no longer the main way the app decides who sees your video. Reels distribution now leans heavily on completion rate, rewatches and shares, with hashtags acting more like keywords for search than levers for reach.
That matters because if you are chasing #funnyvideos or #instahumour thinking it will push your reel into the explore page, you are optimising for the wrong thing. Those tags have tens of millions of posts under them. Your video is one grain of sand on a beach, and Instagram's algorithm is not scrolling through hashtag feeds to decide who to show it to.
What works: three categories, not one list
Stop thinking of hashtags as a single bucket of "good ones". Split them into three jobs, because each one does something different for a comedy account.
- Format tags describe the type of joke, not the subject. Think #skitcomedy, #officehumour, #parodyvideo, #dadjokes, #relatablecontent. These tend to sit between 100,000 and 2 million posts, small enough that your video doesn't vanish in an hour but big enough that real people still browse them.
- Niche subject tags describe what the joke is about: #remoteworklife, #callcentreproblems, #gymhumour, #datingfails. These help Instagram's search match your video to someone typing a specific phrase, which matters more now that Instagram search behaves closer to TikTok's.
- Community or branded tags are ones you invent and repeat, like a running bit tag (#TheMondayMeeting if that's your recurring skit series). These do nothing for discovery in month one, but by month three they become searchable archives of your own back catalogue, which keeps people on your profile longer once they find you, and watch-through across multiple videos is itself a ranking signal.
A worked example: the "Office Mishaps" page
Say you run a comedy account called Office Mishaps, posting 15 second skits about painfully relatable workplace moments: the reply-all email disaster, the meeting that could have been an email, the colleague who microwaves fish. You post three reels a week.
Here is a realistic hashtag set for one video about a reply-all disaster:
- #officehumour (format, roughly 400,000 posts)
- #corporatehumor (format, roughly 1.2 million posts)
- #replyallfail (niche subject, under 20,000 posts)
- #9to5problems (niche subject, around 60,000 posts)
- #OfficeMishaps (your own branded tag, growing over time)
Five tags, not thirty. Instagram's own guidance has moved away from stuffing captions with hashtags, and accounts that still use three to five relevant tags tend to see cleaner performance than ones burying the caption under 25 of them, because the caption reads as spam to both humans and the algorithm's text-matching.
The step most people skip: test in batches, not one at a time
You cannot tell whether a hashtag works by posting one video with it and checking the numbers two days later. Too many other things affect a single video's reach: posting time, the first thirty seconds, whether the sound is trending, whether you replied to early comments fast. One video is not a test, it is a data point.
A more honest way to test hashtags for a comedy account:
- Pick two or three candidate format tags and two or three candidate niche tags.
- Post ten videos over roughly three weeks, rotating which combination of five tags you use, keeping everything else (length, posting time, caption style) as similar as you can.
- Track reach and shares, not just likes, because shares are what tells Instagram a video is funny enough to pass on.
- After ten videos, compare average reach per tag combination, not per single video.
I wrote up a longer breakdown of exactly this kind of testing, going through real numbers from testing 200 hashtags on comedy reels, including which specific tags held up across repeated posting and which looked good on one video and then fell flat on the next nine. The pattern that showed up again and again: tags between 80,000 and 600,000 posts consistently outperformed both the huge generic tags and the tiny ones under 5,000 posts.
The hashtags that keep showing up as reliable for funny videos
Based on that kind of repeated testing rather than a single lucky post, these categories of tags tend to hold up for comedy content:
- Relatable life tags: #adultingishard, #mondaymood, #relatable, #thisisme, #sendhelp
- Skit and format tags: #skit, #parody, #shortfilm, #comedyvideo, #fyp (yes, still worth including, it's not just a TikTok tag anymore)
- Niche subject tags matched to your content, for example #petparents, #teachersoftiktok crossposted to Reels, #ukhumour if your accent and references are clearly British, #smallbusinessowner if your comedy is business-themed
- Trend-adjacent tags tied to a specific sound or format that is currently moving, which you need to check fresh each week because these expire fast
If your comedy leans toward visual or edit-based humour rather than skits, the approach is slightly different again. I covered that separately in a piece on TikTok hashtags for art memes and classical art edits, because meme-format content with a visual punchline gets discovered through very different search terms than a talking-head skit does.
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What to avoid, and the uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say
Avoid the single-word mega tags entirely as a discovery strategy: #funny, #lol, #comedy, #memes. They are fine to include as the fifth or sixth tag if you have room, but if your whole strategy rests on them you are fishing in an ocean with one hook.
Also avoid tags that Instagram has flagged for spam-adjacent behaviour at various points, which rotates over time, so check before you commit to using the same tag on every post for months. A tag that worked fine last year can quietly become restricted, and your reach drops with no explanation in the app.
Now the part most hashtag guides avoid saying outright: even a near-perfect hashtag set will not save a video that isn't funny in the first three seconds. Hashtags help search and categorisation. They do not make the algorithm push a mediocre video to more people, and they never did, not even in 2019. The accounts that treat hashtags as a magic lever instead of a labelling tool are usually the ones spending four hours a week tweaking tag lists instead of writing better jokes or tightening their edit. If you only have an hour, spend fifty minutes on the first three seconds of the video and ten minutes on hashtags. That ratio is uncomfortable to hear if you've been told hashtag research is the growth hack, but it is the honest split of where the use sits.
Where hashtags cross over with other formats
If part of your funny content strategy includes Stories rather than just Reels, hashtags work differently again there, mostly as a discovery sticker rather than a caption tag, and the etiquette around pranks and audience trust matters more than the tag itself. There's a separate guide on running a prank through Instagram Stories without losing followers, which is worth reading if your comedy sometimes crosses into prank territory, because the backlash risk there is real and hashtags won't protect you from it.
For finding fresh tag ideas quickly rather than guessing, a free hashtag generator tool built for TikTok works reasonably well cross-posted to Reels too, since the underlying search behaviour on both platforms has converged a lot over the past couple of years. And if hashtags are one small piece of a wider plan to grow a funny account into something that pays, the broader picture is in the Instagram help guide covering followers, accounts and monetisation together, alongside a separate honest look at whether engagement translates into money, because likes and views on a funny reel do not automatically become income without a separate plan for that.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags should I use on a funny Instagram video?
Three to five well-chosen tags consistently outperform the old advice of stuffing thirty tags into a caption, because the algorithm now weighs relevance over volume and a crowded caption reads as spam.
Do hashtags still matter for Instagram Reels in 2026?
They matter for search and categorisation rather than for reach, which means they help people who are actively looking for your type of content find you, but they will not fix a video that fails to hold attention in its first three seconds.
What hashtag size works best for comedy accounts?
Tags with roughly 80,000 to 600,000 posts tend to perform most reliably, large enough to get genuine browsing traffic, small enough that your video isn't instantly buried under thousands of competitors.
Should I create my own branded hashtag for recurring skits?
Yes, a repeated branded tag does little for discovery at first but becomes a searchable archive of your own content over time, and it encourages viewers to watch several of your videos in one sitting, which helps your account rather than just a single post.
