EpicLLOYD

With creative partner Pete Shukoff, comedian Lloyd Ahlquist parlayed his talent for improvisation into the wildly popular YouTube channel Epic Rap Battles of History, which featured the pair playing famous figures locked in freestyle faceoffs. Born Lloyd Leonard Ahlquist on Staten Island, New York, he formed a comedy troupe, Mission IMPROVable, after dropping out of the Univeristy of Massachusetts Amherst, and later honed his performance skills with the famed Second City in Chicago. While performing improv with IMPROVable collaborators Peter Shukoff and Zach Sherwin in 2010, he created a sketch called "Check OneTwo," in which the trio would take suggestions for famous people from an audience and then pit those figures against each other in freestyle improvised rap. Convinced that the sketch would work well as a YouTube series, Ahlquist and Shukoff launched the Epic Rap Battles of History channels, which featured a faceoff between Bill O'Reilly (Ahlquist) and John Lennon (Shukoff). The pair, along with Sherwin and other comics, soon impersonated dozens of real and fictional personages, from Darth Vader and Justin Bieber to Barack Obama and Chuck Norris, locked in outrageously profane rap battles; by 2014, the channel had earned more than 13.5 million subscribers and more than 3 billion video views, while Ahlquist and Shukoff received a gold record for their battle between Barack Obama (comedian Iman Crosson) and Mitt Romney (Ahlquist). Celebrities also began performing with the duo, including Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who faced off as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Muhammad Ali, Snoop Dogg, "Weird Al" Yankovic" and the comedy duo Smosh. While working on Epic Rap Battles, Ahlquist also maintained his own YouTube channel, which featured a series called "Dis Raps for Hire," where users could request personalized putdowns for someone who bullied them. In 2016, "Epic Rap Battles in History" earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series.