Comedy’s Scrappiest All-Stars
Mia Horton Mark Phillips and RDCWorld have built a DIY content empire. NBA icons and Hollywood producers are taking notice.
The scene opens on a kitchen in a suburban home. A Popeyes employee (Leland Manigo) wearing an apron stands behind the breakfast bar and politely takes an order from a customer (John Newton). The restaurant supervisor, played by Mark Phillips, cannot abide this respectful conduct. He shoves the employee aside and steps in to berate the customer while purposely botching his order. He flies off the handle and fires another employee (Ben Skinner) for having the audacity to use tongs. “This ain’t no five-star restaurant — this is Popeyes,” he yells, his eyes bulging. “Pick it up with your hands!” Only the restaurant’s drive-through attendant (Desmond Johnson) meets Phillips’s exacting standards for customer contempt — by challenging the person on the other side of his headset to a fistfight.
With over 28 million views, “How Popeyes Be Training They Employees” is the most-watched sketch on RDCWorld’s (an acronym for “Real Dreams Change the World”) popular YouTube channel. Over the past 11 years, the seven-person collective has become a rising comedy empire whose videos have amassed nearly 1.4 billion views on the platform. Phillips is front and center in all of them, contorting his elastic face into looks of disbelief and exasperation — a walking, talking reaction gif of a punch line. The 29-year-old — who writes the group’s sketches — is RDC’s driving force creatively and operationally. “I always had a pretty clear vision,” says Phillips, who is more gregarious in person than his fast-food drill sergeant. It’s the day after the 2023 Streamy Awards, and his voice is hoarse from celebrating the group’s win for Comedy. We’re sitting in the living room of a penthouse Phillips shares with the rest of the group, one of two rentals in the same West Hollywood building.
Hailing from Waco, Texas, most of RDC met and started working together in high school and college, and that tight-knit hometown dynamic is part of its appeal. Many of the group’s videos — from silly riffs on retail stores to clever dissections of shared social frustrations — feel like outgrowths of the types of things you might joke about with your friends. Some of the premises seem flimsy until they’re heightened in unexpected directions. It’s not just that Popeyes employees are rude to their customers; it’s that their rudeness is so habitual it must be baked into their training. RDC has a handful of niches it tends to return to in its comedy — hip-hop, video games, basketball, and anime — which has helped it build distinct fan bases. Bashir Salahuddin, the co-creator of the Max TV series South Side, compares watching the group to his early experiences watching In Living Color. “The first time I saw that show, I didn’t know you could do sketch comedy about hip-hop,” he says.
RDC’s fans include LeBron James and Kyrie Irving, who love the sketches in which Phillips plays disgruntled NBA players and coaches — most famously James himself — reacting to fresh losses and news stories. J. Cole knows the group for a series in which Phillips plays a verklempt fan of the rapper who’s physically unable to process the profundity of his music. In 2019, when Kendrick Lamar had an idea for a sketch about a rapper’s hypemen getting too carried away recording a song’s ad-libs, he FaceTimed Phillips to pitch it. (The resulting sketch has over 9.3 million views.)
Living together has enabled the group to spend all day brainstorming ideas, filming videos, and streaming on Twitch to hundreds of thousands of viewers multiple times a week — like the residents of a content house if they were actual friends instead of private-equity cash cows. It also ensures they’re always ready to respond quickly to buzzworthy news events (like the Oscars slap and Instagram’s launch of Threads). Their “NBA locker room” videos, which they film immediately after notable games, regularly go viral thanks to the speed at which they pump them out. “They say all the shit that everybody’s thinking,” Irving once said.
Clicking through the archives of RDC’s videos is an exercise in watching its members grow up on-camera. That includes co-founder Affiong Harris (Phillips’s childhood best friend), Manigo (his first cousin), Johnson (his middle-school friend), Skinner (Harris’s college friend), Dylan Patel (a high-school friend of Manigo’s), and Newton (who met them after a failed attempt to shoot a local news story about the group). Lining the walls of their living room are anime posters; props from their videos and loose articles of RDC merchandise are strewn about the floor. They’ve come a long way from the first time they lived in a house together in Denton, where they camped out in the living room on air mattresses for weeks and watched old DVDs while they waited for the internet to be installed. “I want you to know that Dylan goes to the bathroom seven times a day,” Phillips says abruptly at one point. “For 40-minute intervals,” adds Newton. The room explodes into cross-talk. Patel jumps in to defend himself. “I just be in there,” he says. “It’s my alone time!”
Phillips doesn’t take for granted how rare it is to be able to live and work with his best friends. He can’t count the number of people who have come up to him and said the group’s DIY success represents everything they might’ve accomplished if only “they’d picked a different route and stayed with their friends.” Lately, though, his star has been taking him to places where the rest of RDC can’t always follow. When UTA came calling to offer representation, for example, the agency signed Phillips solo. He has a number of projects in the works, including an anime and an accompanying manga with Michael B. Jordan, a horror movie with Jordan Peele, and a TV show with South Side creators Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle. He maintains a firm party line about wanting to bring the group with him wherever he goes. “I don’t want to work with random people,” he says. “I want to work with people I have chemistry with, and these are the people I have chemistry with.”
Phillips grew up the youngest of six siblings. His father was in the Navy, and his mother worked as a registered nurse. He says being funny was, in part, a coping mechanism for being “ugly as a kid.” It wasn’t until his dreams of being a manga writer hit an early roadblock at 16 that he considered performing. That manga, The Resistance, follows a group of teenagers who team up to rebel against the world’s villain rulers. Phillips and Harris, the book’s illustrator — who met at 12 and connected over a shared love of manga and rap — sent it out unsuccessfully to every manga publisher whose address they could track down. They received one reply, from Tokyo-based Kodansha: It said, “Keep going.” Where they went next — YouTube — they could explore their various interests without the restriction of gatekeepers. So they picked up a camera, called some of their friends, and started shooting. In 2012, the RDCWorld YouTube channel was born.
Their earliest sketch on the platform, “Hilarious Home Video,” features Phillips, Johnson, and Manigo kicking back to watch Pokémon in Harris’s childhood home; the latter is behind the camera. Manigo starts to point out gaps in the show’s logic: “Pokémon has been going on since ’95. Why hasn’t Ash aged at all?” It’s rough, but there are traces of RDC’s DNA in its dialogue and subject matter: the way they rib pop culture; the way Manigo delivers the line, “There goes my childhood.” “My head was skinny, Leland’s head was skinny as hell, Desmond is ugly, and we’re sorry with camerawork,” Phillips says looking back. “But I still think it’s funny.”
A few months later, Phillips and Harris went off to different colleges — Phillips to the University of North Texas in Denton and Harris to the University of Texas at Arlington. Separately, they began filming and posting of-the-era vlogs with titles like “College Life—The Cons of Having a Roommate! (Very Funny)” and “Confessions of a Krispy Kreme Employee” to keep their channel alive. In 2014, a friend of Phillips’s suggested he upload his videos on Instagram, then a relatively new video platform. He started shooting 15-second sketches solo and posting them to his personal account, @supremedreams_1. He also came up with a plan to increase the account’s visibility. “While I was in class, I’d be on Instagram and Facebook writing down the names of every successful meme page I was going to send my videos to,” he says. “Most of them didn’t respond, but luckily two or three did, and they liked the videos.” The administrators of these pages messaged Phillips back asking for $250 to $300 for a repost — money, at the time, he did not have. He struck a deal with them: “If you post it and it does better than the other posts on your page, you’ve got to keep it up. If it doesn’t, I’ll pay the money.” He never had to pay.
It wasn’t long before Phillips had his first hit on his hands: 2015’s “This Is How Math Was Made.” That video, in which he plays a mathematician prankster who hits an imaginary blunt and then invents the idea of algebra just to screw with people, performed so well that he might have kicked himself for forgetting to brand it with a watermark if not for the fact that each of his next few Instagram videos went on to reach a million views too. Confident in the momentum he’d built, Phillips persuaded the other members of RDC — who’d recently dropped out of college or were in various states of working out what to do next — to join him in Denton so they could make videos full time.
That year, the five of them (Patel and Newton had yet to officially join) moved into the same apartment complex. Over the next two years, all of them took on day jobs while they figured out how to turn the operation into a business. Throughout his life, Phillips had had trouble with this idea because, as he puts it (with a hint of pride), “I ain’t believe in no jobs.” He lasted three weeks working overnights at Mars Wrigley Confectionery, where he would’ve quit sooner if not for the abundance of free candy. He pushed shopping carts at Walmart in 100-degree weather, where he completed corporate training but then left on his first lunch break and never went back. Even the flexibility of driving for Uber on his own schedule was too restrictive for his liking, particularly when he found out he had a long fare ahead of him. “Deadass, I’d drive off on people,” he says.
The guys learned a lesson in the business of making money on the internet with one of their first viral hits, 2015’s “When People Take Anime Too Far.” They applied for monetization on YouTube too late to cash in on its more than 20 million views. “We thought the money was just supposed to come,” says Phillips. (He adds that YouTube monetization continues to be tricky, as many of RDC’s videos get demonetized because of the use of the N-word.) The group’s earliest financial break came in 2017 by way of its first brand deal: a $20,000 payday from the video game Naruto Online for putting an advertisement in a video on its main channel. The following year, Phillips signed a six-figure deal with the sports-media giant House of Highlights to create sketches, mostly about basketball, under the banner The Supreme Dreams Show. The more its platform has grown, the more streams of income RDC has introduced into the mix: merchandise; Twitch streaming; in-person appearances at high-profile events; a subscription-based website with exclusive content called RDC Universe; in 2018, they launched an annual anime, gaming, and pop-culture convention, Dream Con (this year’s brought in 20,000 attendees).
Each member of the team took on a role to ensure the operation ran smoothly. Harris became RDC’s go-to cameraperson and postproduction specialist. Manigo and Johnson would trade off roles as the second and third leads in RDC’s sketches; Manigo managed brand and design while Johnson worked on visual effects. Skinner oversaw audio recording and handled business administration. Patel was in charge of the technical coordination of livestreams, and Newton handled the organization of Dream Con. Phillips oversaw it all. “He’s so dedicated,” says Skinner. “I’ve never been around someone like that. That’s the reason I decided to follow him on this journey.”
Phillips prefers the term entertainer to comedian. “I want to make movies,” he says. “I don’t want to be the token comedian in a movie. I want to be a director; I want to write.” He’s working on three Hollywood projects at the moment, and all of them are either stalled, or in the case of the Peele film, too early to talk about. It makes him appreciate the comparative freedom of YouTube. “That’s why Hollywood is being overtaken by content creators,” he says. “Content creators are gonna work for it. Hollywood’s gonna go on 19 vacations and then try to put a movie out.”
Phillips is speaking not so subtly about Dark Lights, an anime that, until recently, was being co-produced by Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society Productions and Issa Rae’s company, Hoorae, for Max. Co-written with Philip Gelatt, best known for his work on Netflix’s Love Death + Robots, and set to star the members of RDC in voice roles, the anime was based in “an alternate version of modern-day America, where everyone in the hood has a superhuman ability” that activates at nighttime. Max dropped it post-WGA strike. Before that, it had been tied up in development logjams for two and a half years. “What really slowed it down is that somebody bought HBO,” Phillips explains, referring to the Max and Discovery+ merger finalized in mid-2023. Jordan is still attached, and he and Phillips plan to shop it around to other networks. In the meantime, Phillips took the opportunity to drop chapter one of the show’s accompanying manga on RDC Universe; demand was so high it crashed the website.
Phillips and Hoorae remain engaged in talks to develop other show ideas in the future. “He’s just objectively funny. He reminds me of a family member,” says Rae of Phillips. She sees some of her own journey in his. She started her career online with her acclaimed web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. In her case, it took HBO two years to green-light the pilot for Insecure. It’s a process that requires patience. “There’s a grace that one may have to extend that you may not have the energy to give,” she says.
Phillips has been fortunate thus far in that Rae, his most prominent collaborator, sees the value of bringing the rest of RDC along with him. “They are an Avengers of sorts, and I think he’s better because of them,” she says. But she’s hardly representative of the industry at large. Phillips doesn’t roll seven deep into pitch meetings with executives because he understands the optics. “But believe: I’m always going to ask, ‘Can my people be the cast?’ ” he says. “ ’Cause that’s what it’s got to be.” At the same time, he knows some opportunities will help him grow his brand as an individual, which will also help grow the RDC brand. He does high-profile podcast interviews on his own; he attends swanky events like the Roc Nation brunch; and he continues to promote his personal Instagram, which has 1.4 million more followers than RDC’s official account. His loftiest goal — launching an umbrella production studio — is an idea Phillips conceived of in part to encompass the ambitions of each member of RDC, many of whom don’t aspire to be writers or actors. Harris, for example, is a rapper who wants to make music like Quasimoto or Gorillaz; Johnson wants to oversee a visual-effects team.
At the Streamy Awards’ sponsored, neon-flecked reception, Phillips does a lap. All around us, people are taking pictures, brands and influencers are fielding collab pitches, and YouTuber Airrack is stomping around in the big yellow MSCHF x Crocs boots that went viral online (“Super-comfortable,” he tells me in passing). Phillips is trying to scarf down a couple of tacos from the buffet, but he can barely get a bite in without someone asking for a minute of his time. Having moved from Texas earlier this year, he says he’s uncomfortable at L.A. events like this one, but he seems to have mastered the art of giving everyone who approaches him one genuine moment. He makes it a point to ask fans what they do; he leans in to confirm the spelling of a musician duo’s name so he can look them up on Apple Music; he graciously agrees to record a video shout-out for a woman’s boyfriend, even though she confesses she doesn’t know his name. In a brief lull between conversations, I see his eyes darting around the party. He turns to me and asks, “Do you see any of my group?”
Comedy’s Scrappiest All-Stars
