Fin Taylor vs The Internet

·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Finn Taylor's online show delivers an unbelievable barrage of roast jokes to internet-famous guests' faces.

Finn Taylor returns with more life in the rear view. Stu frames the chat around Finn Taylor versus the internet, the online show built with Horatio Gould and Vittorio Angeloni after two children and a burst of public success. The follower count setup gets poked almost straight away. Finn is meant to be learning the internet from people with bigger audiences, but Stu spots the stranger engine underneath it. This is roast comedy with the target close enough to blink at the punchline. The guests get only a small bit of introduction before the format tips into a deliberately awkward imbalance: one person taking the jokes while others laugh nearby. Stu keeps testing the frame. He trusts Finn, and that trust opens the better question: can an audience read intent when they do not know the performer? The word silo does useful work here. Internet fame is treated as chopped up and oddly lonely, where big names still need explaining because plenty of viewers will not know them. Context becomes part of the joke, not furniture around it. Finn talks through warming guests up, pulling material from a sheet of paper, and knowing that maybe only fifteen seconds of the usual intro will make the final piece. Stu asks for examples with care. He wants the taste of the show, but he also keeps hold of how risky it can feel when the lines look harsh on paper. The writing matters. The jokes land because they are built well, not only because the targets agree to sit there. Stu circles back to trust again and again. The issue is not simply whether the jokes are offensive. It is whether the setup, the sparkle, and the performance cues give strangers enough to understand the rules. That is the craft bit under the silliness. By the end, the conversation turns inward, with Stu half joking about meds, Glastonbury, not drinking, exercise, sleep, and the irritating bargain behind feeling happier. The laugh has a shrug in it. Offstage, as onstage, the thing that helps is often the thing nobody particularly wants to do.

As heard by us

A roast-format interview that gets under the jokes and into the mechanics of online trust.

Stu Goldsmith keeps the focus on the machinery behind Finn Taylor versus the internet: the 15-second b-roll, the assumption that most viewers will not know the guest, and the logic of a show built around roast jokes delivered straight to one person's face while two other people…

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Why you'd press play

For the listener who wants roast jokes, internet fame, and a very nervous trust exercise.

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