He calls himself the “new woke TikTok king” and likes to address weighty issues like racism through humour. His videos have got about 6 million views in just three months. And he might just be the only TikToker in the United States to be cited by a federal judge in their order.

For someone who wanted to avoid TikTok, Karan Menon, a New Jersey resident and Indian-origin comedian, appears to be doing extremely well on the video-sharing social media network.

“It was very clear that he was funny,” a collaborator from university said about Menon. “We knew from the jump. He’s just grown ever since.”

Menon is the son of Indian immigrants. His father, Uday Menon, a professor of data science at Columbia University, moved to the United States in the 1980s and his mother, Surekha Collur, an ophthalmologist, immigrated in the 1990s.

Menon was part of a college sketch comedy group at his school, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, while studying narrative studies and screenwriting. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, he returned home to Holmdel, New Jersey, and began experimenting with TikTok in June.

The result – videos on subjects ranging from Black Lives Matter to voter suppression – was a near-instant success. His first two videos garnered around 40,000 views. But by the third video, he was getting more than a million views, making him the next rising star on TikTok.

“At the end of May, with George Floyd’s killing, and everything that came after that, nobody was in the mood for more whacky kind of comedy,” he told Al Jazeera’s online channel AJ+. “People were using social media for a purpose, for information. I shouldn’t be making comedy was my first reaction. Then I was like, there are absurd things to talk about that aren’t completely detached from reality. There’s stuff like qualified immunity…”

In his video on qualified immunity – a legal doctrine that protects state actors like the police from civil rights lawsuits in the US – he plays two students and a teacher.

The video begins with one student repeatedly slapping the other. When the victim complains to the teacher, he is explained that, by law, the aggressor cannot be punished now if he was not punished for similar acts in the past. Accompanying the video is Menon’s message: “END QUALIFIED IMMUNITY, HOLD COPS ACCOUNTABLE, SPREAD THE WORD.”

Menon finds that humour makes people listen, even if the subject is difficult. “Nobody wants to be told anything, no matter what side you’re on,” he told AJ+. “You don’t want to be given facts. You want to be entertained a little, maybe have the information slipped in. You’re just more open to accepting information when there’s humor involved and you’re laughing.”