Mandem On The Wall, who are Joivan Wade (Failia) Percelle Ascot (Yungah Baby Tinie Winie) and Dee Kartier ( Youngah Baker), are one of the UK’s biggest online personalities having generated over 40 million views on their YouTube channel, as well as featuring on Channel 4’s hit series ‘Youngers’.
The comedic trio are set to wreak havoc at Hackney Empire as they bring their hilarious comedy to the stage with a live show called Mandem Live. We sat down with the trio to talk about being a comedian in the UK and to find out more about the boys first live performance as Mandem on the Wall.
Tell us about Mandem live in 10 words:
Failia: 10 words? 10 words? I like this. Okay, okay. You’ve got me doing maths?
Oh erm, 1.funny, 2. electric, 3. revolutionary
Yungah baby TW: Ah c’mon you just stole my word from previous.
Epic, Evolutionary, Utopia
Yungah Baker: Ground breaking
Failia: Amazing 9. Astounding
Yungah Baker: Social change
Is Mandem Live an opportunity that came up or was it always your vision to perform a live comedy act?
Yeah a bit of both, when we had it first set out we definitely set out to you know use youtube in order to create a TV series and go onto do films and take it to that level it was definitely apart of the plan we didn’t realise how soon or even that it would come before the tv series or our own tv series but we knew it would come..
Do you think comedy is a profession that directly appeals to young people when you have so much emphasis placed on entertainment careers such as Music and Sport, especially in the UK?
Failia: That’s a very good question, the good thing about comedy is that it connects to everyone, it’s a universal thing do you know what I mean?
Yungah Baker: In terms of people wanting to do comedy themselves I feel like there might be interest but cause it’s not an infrastructure here in the UK for that to grow and develop you find that a lot of people tend to fall off and then attach themselves to sport or music because there are structures there which you know can hold and you know help people grow. There’s nothing here. If you look at who’s doing comedy right now in the scene, there’s a handful of people and not much of a scene yet, but hopefully that’s going to change with the unity and all of us working together to build it.
Have you had any guidance from your peers in the comedy world?
Failia: Yeah definitely, a lot of guidance from peers people like Jazzie Zonzolo reached out to us when we first started and asked to come on board and be in our series and stuff from the start,
Yungah Baby TW: not gonna lie it wasn’t everyone though, a lot of people didn’t know how to take it at first in the comedy industry,we got a lot of love and support from the music industry, even more than we did from the comedy industry at the jump but after a while people started to gravitate
Yungah Baker: All we’ve gotta do right now is get together and continue to build this scene or else there’s no foundations and there’s no young people who can attach themselves to this because if we don’t act now and do things like the mandem live show and all support each other, we’re always gonna repeat the same cycle, where there’ll be comedians and then there’ll be nothing and then there’ll be the same thing over and over again.
You’ve mentioned before that you guys are self funded. How do you see yourself being able to monetise what you do?
Failia: by doing things like Mandem Live it is our first step to building an empire, creating a culture where people do buy into what you do in terms of introducing new content to our audience different to the free material they get from us where they actually have to put their hands in there pockets and come out it, we are hoping that it starts to create a culture whereby people start to do that respect our skillets enough to want to invest in us.
On the live show are you going to perform material that you have practiced or follow in the footsteps of stand-up comedians that interact with their audience to generate original content?
Yungah Baby TW: Yeah Mandem Live is gonna have both, it’s gonna have original content that we’ve spent a lot of time writing with our cowriter Danny Robins (Rudy Rare Records) we’ve written a strong piece, a coherent story from beginning to end built up of sketches but at the same time we do have room and we do have elements of the show where we will be interacting with the audience and bringing fresh material based on that.
With social media’s incredible speed to generate meme’s and vines about every trending topic out there within minutes of the topic hitting the net. How easy is it for you guys to create original content around popular issues?
Yungah Baker: Very easy, very easy. We started using Facebook, we had a Facebook page with 55 thousand likes and that was in October and now it’s on 250 thousand and that’s due to the fact that we were touching on topics immediately, doing videos and vines about that and then releasing it.
Yungah Baby TW: It’s important to always keep your ear to the ground and stay in line with the trends and stuff, on the flip side to that because everyone can create content so quickly you have to be on the ball all the time. You can’t ever stay put you’ve just gotta move with the time.
Failia: And the demand, there’s a high demand now videos are like 10 seconds and they’re instant. everyone’s releasing things daily so it’s like you know, if you’re not apart of that you drown And we’ve done well in making sure we’re apart of that.
Are mandem on the wall ever gonna let a girl enter the squad? Cause girls can be mandem too
Failia: I think, not to give anything away but you’re gonna see something on the live show that’s touching on that little subject there. People always say you’ve got mandem on the wall, where’s the girl dem on the wall? The girls tryna sit on the wall as well you know. And erm we answered a lot of questions, yeah man stay tuned.
Youngers was a really good platform for you guys as it fused the act of chilling on the wall so well, it made what you do come across as organic and an extension of the culture. Would you ever do acting work as a threesome without the wall and inner city back drop?
Yungah Baby TW: Yes 100% mandem on the wall is just a piece of the puzzle that is under our umbrella, a huge umbrella that we are creating right now, it includes us writing shows using different characters and we’ve got script deals which are away from the Mandem on the wall.
Do your parents find you funny?
Yungah Baker: I’ll tell you this from now I am the funniest person in my household, my dad finds me hilarious.
Yungah Baby TW: I would say no, from my end, but you know, I accept it’s not their sense of humour
Failia: I’d say yeah,
‘Mandem Live’ is at the Hackney Empire theatre on the 11 April at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £8 – £10. All ages are welcome.
For more information and to buy tickets, click here.
