Jov Khan doesn’t think she’s famous. She doesn’t even think she’s funny. “I honestly don’t find the things coming out of my mouth funny. I think they’re clever maybe, but I’ll never be flat-out laughing so hard unless I’m doing my whistling tea kettle laugh that everyone’s obsessed with,” says the Dallas-based comedian. And yet, she’s wrangled a following of more than 126k on Instagram and 450k on TikTok, all by documenting the daily chaos of family life: rifling through relatives’ handbags like they’re treasure troves of shame, complaining about chores and the audacity of her family members, and GRWM segments that are less “here’s how I glow up” and more “here’s how my family actively makes my life worse”. Watching her videos, you get the sense that the 28-year-old really does believe she’s not being funny—and maybe that’s what makes them so much more fun to watch.
When Khan first started, she wasn’t chasing followers, sponsorship deals, or a neatly packaged online identity. She filmed herself going through the contents of her older sister’s handbag out of boredom, twisting open tubes and sniffing them, retching at the scents before tossing them aside, and the internet lapped it up. “I remember sneaking into [my sister’s] room while she was sleeping. I just went in and made the videos early in the morning and they’d get a million or more views, and I was like, what is this? I wasn’t even being funny at that point,” she recalls. Looking back at her first few videos now, she’s characteristically unimpressed with her past self: “I’m like, you were so boring. You didn’t even say anything clever. I think the entertainment factor was just me going through her bag.”
Before becoming an internet-famous comedian, Khan studied Fashion Marketing in college and worked part-time at a fashion start-up. Comedy wasn’t on her radar. “Now, though, I feel like it’s the only thing I could probably ever do. I get asked all the time: Can you have a show? Can you be on one? When the stars align, it’ll happen.”
Scrolling through her videos, you’ll soon realise her content feels like a peek behind the curtain of a family sitcom that no one asked for but everyone secretly loves. It’s the kind of humour that garners comments like “I love whatever is wrong with you” and compels absolute strangers to DM her “Can we be besties?”. Asked if her family would sign up for a reality show—Keeping Up with The Khans, perhaps—she snorts: “My older sister, the married one, would love that. She thinks she’s so famous, it’s crazy.” Members of her household serve as a cast of recurring characters in her comedic universe. “It’s their dream to be in my videos. I have three sisters, and they’ll just come up to me and ask, Can I be in this? Can I do this and that? They’re just ready to jump into it every second.”
There’s the scandalised older sister (“She’s actually so annoying”); her sister’s husband who ambushes her mid-filming and tries to turn the joke on her (“I don’t understand what he’s trying to do ’cause I’m the star of the joke. He’s my enemy”); “Mama Jov”, who’s now a legend on her followers’ feeds; and her dad, who takes immense pride in the pool’s chlorine levels and saving electricity. She talks about each member exactly how she does online; real-life family squabbles get turned into running gags. It’s hard not to see how these candid moments and petty rivalries from her actual life become the raw material for her comedy.
Their handbags are goldmines, and Khan’s specialty is rummaging for roast-worthy finds. “They have such random trash in there. My mom once had a single sock inside the makeup pouch in her bag. I’m like, why do you always have a single sock with you? And she has no idea.” When asked what the weirdest thing in her own bag would be right now, she quips: “I’m pretty cool—that’s the problem. But it would probably be this condom they gave me when I visited the MAC Cosmetics headquarters in New York. It’s got this cute red and black packaging that says ‘MAC Cosmetics’ on it. It’s in my makeup bag and I just have it with me all the time, because you never know...”
It’s hard to tell when Khan is joking—she is almost indistinguishable from her online persona. I remark it’s jarring how much her on-screen and off-screen selves sync up. The same dry banter and sharp one-liners that punctuate her videos are delivered with no difference over the phone. There is one preconception of her, though, that she defies. “People think that I’m gonna scream and be insane even in an everyday, real-life setting,” she laughs. “I will be witty, or even funny, but I’m not gonna be screaming at random people,” she says, quickly adding, “Unless I really want to.” The idea is both amusing and slightly terrifying. Her trademark scream, she adds, is “definitely a natural gift. I don’t practise it at all”.
In the influencer economy, where every post tends to be carefully curated and polished to the point of near unreality, Khan’s content is unapologetically unrefined. Despite thousands of followers, PR gifts, and brand partnerships, Khan doesn’t see herself as an influencer. “I definitely don’t consider myself a beauty guru or an influencer,” she insists, sounding unimpressed by the idea of trying to sell anything beyond a good joke. The very fact that she refuses the influencer label is perhaps what makes her so relatable. She is a comedian first—one who found her audience by holding up a mirror to the absurdities of family life.
Her creative process is quick, unscripted, and paced for maximum chaos. Most videos take five minutes or less from start to finish. “These things just come out of my mouth,” she admits. “I don’t even know, but it just does, especially on good days. Sometimes while making a video, I’m like, wow, like that was good.”
Even with this low-effort approach, brands have taken notice. One of her first collaborations came from Vaseline, and the brand gifted her a bedazzled tub of petroleum jelly that still makes cameos in her Reels. “I’ve kept it forever,” she says. “I love bedazzled anything.” Since then, she’s bagged partnerships with Milk Makeup, Ouai, Shay Mitchell’s Béis Travel, Ulta Beauty, and Wendy’s, among others. And in classic Jov Khan fashion, her branded videos feel less like ads and more like personal rants. Every sponsorship is seamlessly absorbed into her brand of chaos.
Her audience keeps begging her to do more, but her ambitions extend off-screen too—like writing screenplays or making a movie—not necessarily a comedy. “I’ve written screenplays; I just don’t know where they’re gonna end up,” she says, careful not to sound delusional. “I could do stand-up. I honestly still could write a comedy show. It’s just about if the opportunity ever arises. Everyone says to go to an open-mic night and it’s definitely on my mind.”
Her most immediate goal? To keep posting every day, a task that remains “exhausting but never enough” while wrangling her family members in and out of the frame.
As our conversation winds down, I pull up her Famous Birthdays page on screen. “Why are they posting me? I’m actually crying,” she yelps half amused, half horrified at the discovery. She swears she has no idea why anybody wants to take selfies with her in public. “I guess when you’re psychotic online, people expect you to scream or say something crazy,” she shrugs. “I’m confused as to why they want pictures with me because I’m not anybody, but I’m like, yeah, sure, because it’s not that big a deal.” For Khan, the idea of celebrity feels laughably distant. “I’m not famous,” she repeats. “I’m the one making sure the pool boy is here cleaning the pool, taking care of the house, and who puts the trash outside every Thursday.”
Online and offline, Khan is the same—just a tad bit quieter if there’s no camera rolling. But don’t let your guard down. If the mood strikes, she might just scream anyway.
