by Wait. What now?
Humza Arshad is a 29-year-old YouTube comedian in London, born to Pakistani parents and brought up Muslim. He studied performing arts in college and followed that up with drama school.
In 2009, Arshad joined YouTube, where his first effort was a five-episode webseries, “Chronicles of Tuttoo,” about “a loser who gets himself into a big complicated situation.”
Arshad’s next effort was simpler, and much more successful. “Diary Of A Bad Man” debuted in September 2010, telling the story over several chapters about said bad man who ran about the world “with the mentality of a 7-year-old.”
This first installment has generated more than 4.7 million views on YouTube and remains his most popular video. It captured the attention of British police, too.
They’ve employed him as a counter-terrorism measure, showing his videos in schools across the United Kingdom and sending him personally into schools to spread a comedic message to students, with the explicit aim of preventing teens from running off to join ISIS or another terrorist group.
“We need things like this, especially with all the kids going off to Syria and a lot of people getting radicalized and thinking it’s a holy war,” Arshad told CBS This Morning in a story which aired today.
Here’s how Barshad explained his decision earlier to the BBC.
“And I thought, the police? Do I really want to work with them? I mean, that’s my street cred going really down,” he told CBS. “But then I realized I didn’t really have much street cred in the first place, so I thought, ‘Hey, let’s just do it.”‘
Roll the clip!
Arshad’s Humza Productions channel on YouTube boasted 243,721 subscribers as of this morning, with total views climbing past 62.6 million since 2009.
