“Viral video” is a phrase recklessly thrown around the Internet like food in a high school cafeteria (or maybe that was just my high school). There’s no exact science to it; for whatever reason, certain pieces just take off, bouncing around the world until, oftentimes, the subject is forgotten entirely or turned into a punchline.
But when you’re Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist, the chaos never stops. Everything they create together is YouTube gold.
The duo—better known online by their handles “Nice Peter” and “EpicLLOYD”—created the widely popular “Epic Rap Battles of History” Web series on YouTube in 2010, to date amassing 3 billion total views and 12.5 million subscribers. Like most notable YouTubers, they started minimal and DIY. Their first video—John Lennon V Bill O’Reilly—was created with one old microphone, a laptop and a recording studio they built out of a spare bedroom. The video now has more than 35 million views.
Each video is beautifully simple: Shukoff, 36, and Ahlquist, 38, are shown as celebrity personas (in full costume) conducting a rap battle against one another. At the end, they ask their viewers to vote on who won. Tens of thousands of comments follow below the video. Since 2010, the duo has seven certified gold singles and averages 20 million views per upload. They’ve even collaborated with Snoop Dogg, “Weird Al” Yankovic and comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
Shukoff and Ahlquist met in Chicago at a party in the early 2000s and later traveled around the Midwest in the same improv group (MISSION IMPROVable). But it wasn’t until 2010, when they linked up again after individually moving to California, that “Epic Rap Battles of History” was born. The duo, which recently spoke with RedEye by phone from its current home base of Los Angeles, began a 51-city, 14-country tour in L.A. on Aug. 16 and will wrap up in Paris on Nov. 1. At 8 p.m. Thursday, you can catch them at Reggies (2105 S. State St.). $25-$30, 17+.
51 cities. Wow. But I bet your stop in Chicago has to be a special one for you guys.
Peter Shukoff: Definitely. We remember grinding away in Chicago trying different versions of music and comedy, both together and solo. There’s such a purity in Chicago when it comes to performing. We improvised there for a long time, and we did it because it was fun. It’s going to be great being back.
I’ve heard you guys reference Chicago as being such a monumental staple of where you are today.
Lloyd Ahlquist: It’s such a great place to dream. The buildings are high and beautiful. The Second City stages are gorgeous. You have all these places within Chicago to dream and strive for. It taught us how to chase what we wanted.
Had you guys known all along that you wanted to perform and make content as a duo?
PS: We were just always trying to perform. We wanted to do improv open mic nights as much as possible, but in Chicago that was tough. I toured and did concerts around the Midwest. We did improv shows in lunch rooms together at different schools. We were just making it work. That taught us a lot to push something until it worked. Until the audience loves it. We wouldn’t change any of that now.
LA: The thing the two of us always had in common was rap music, for whatever reason. That was the unique thing to the two of us. We really liked to rap. That ended up being the ticket that took off. We did some great shows with a lot of great people, but there was something about that bond that we shared that kept us close.
When you think about your work having billions of views, how does one even wrap their head around that figure?
PS: When I was making smaller videos and they were getting like 10,000 views, I had a sense of who my audience was. I would get letters and drawings from fans, and I felt I understood who that person was, with their own sense of opinions and feelings. But when the numbers grew, I was intimidated by it. Honestly, I freaked out a bit. I got scared by my own audience.
It was tough to decipher who they were and keep up with the numbers?
PS: Yeah, but also we found out our younger viewers were using our videos to help teach them philosophy and American history. We humanized people from history in a way that they could relate with. I mean, these are funny rap videos, but it’s inspiring kids to learn more.
You guys are such an inspiration for content creators. You taught yourself the skills you needed to get where you are today with “Epic Rap Battles of History.” A lot of people give up because they don’t know how to edit video, for example.
PS: It’s funny because Lloyd hired me years ago to edit a promo video for our improv group, and my payment was the hard drive that would hold the footage.
[Laughs.] That was your paycheck, the hard drive?
PS: Yeah, it was only like 250 gigs.
LA: No way, 250 megabytes. That was standard definition video back then.
PS: Oh, right. [Laughs.] That was long before 250-gigabyte drives existed.
LA: Yeah, and they still charged like $199 for those.
So how did you guys finally transition into making these raps and posting them on YouTube? The production always has been really impressive, even since the very beginning.
PS: Thanks, man. Lloyd came to me with the idea and pitched it as an improv show. So I brought the idea up to our soon-to-be director, Dave McCary, as a video series, and he provided a ton of great direction and ideas from there. We even talked to our current audience [on Shukoff’s personal YouTube channel where he was already making content] and asked, “How do you guys think we should do this? Which celebrities should we put in it?”
LA: Then the goal became to just make a really good YouTube video for people to see. And the rest kind of figured itself out.
You guys are better known online as your handles, Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD. Are you called that by fans?
LA: [Laughs.] People are more inclined to yell our handles at us when they’re half a block away and they notice us. Someone screamed “EpicLLOYD!” at me today from down the street. But when they’re meeting us after a show, they’ll address us by name normally.
You guys are so modest about it all. The amount of time you put into one 3-minute YouTube video is unbelievable. It has to be tough putting together such crisp, consistent material like that.
LA: Once the popularity of the rap battles took off, our friendship and ability to delegate and communicate and work through conflicts together was amazing. That’s where our history [together] helped us. Any good project is going to have conflicts from time to time. Differing ideas or where the series is going, and I think the fact that we both knew we just wanted to make the best content possible got us through any of that.
PS: We can both be hardheaded and stubborn, but we always made it work.
How many people are now helping put together the final products that we see on YouTube?
LA: Pete and I are the spokesmen, but we have this team of people now, which is beautiful. We’ve transitioned to learning how to manage a team, which is honestly the hardest part of it all.
PS: Five people were involved in the making of the first one [in 2010]. We were doing it all, like gluing mustaches on our own faces and everything.
BY THE NUMBERS:
Epic Rap Battles of History episodes: 57
Rank on YouTube: 17th most-subscribed channel
Number of episodes exceeding 80 million views: 6
Certified gold singles: 7
Video with the most views: “Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney” with 110 million views
