Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing Comedy

How many comedy writers does it take to make a Hollywood star laugh? A half-dozen staffers for the comedy website Funny or Die are sitting around a conference table on a recent Tuesday afternoon taking a stab at it. Their target: 23-year-old actress Camilla Belle (When a Stranger Calls), the latest Hollywood celeb to make the unlikely pilgrimage to a modest suite of offices on Hollywood Boulevard to discuss starring in a Funny or Die video.

(See behind-the-scenes pictures at Funny or Die’s offices.)

The writers come armed with ideas pegged to Belle’s résumé along with a few pet projects in need of a star. Belle appeared in the prehistoric adventure film 10,000 B.C. and had a role in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. How about a sketch in which she insists she won’t do another film unless it has prehistoric animals in it? She’s into dance, and her mother is Brazilian — maybe a parody of Dirty Dancing using Brazilian fight dancing? The pitches come as fast as Belle can utter her polite, encouraging responses (“That’s funny” … “uh-huh” … “yeah, yeah, yeah”). A celebrity photo shoot in which the pretentious photographer wields a cheesy cell-phone camera? A commercial for a line of anatomically revealing women’s jeans? A fake TV promo for a girls’ classic like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables done up in the style of The Hills?

(See the greatest moments in Web comedy.)

A dozen or so ideas later, Belle is out the door, and Mike Farah, 31, Funny or Die’s president of production, has retreated to his office, a couple of writers tagging along, to check on some other projects in the works. He jabs at the speakerphone and puts in a quick call to Charlize Theron’s manager to see if they can get her for a cameo in a World Cup bit they’re shooting in South Africa. “She loves you guys,” says the voice on the phone. “Can you just send me an e-mail?” A writer tells Farah there’s a chance they can hook up with NBA star Dwyane Wade in Chicago for a piece they want to shoot at a sporting-goods store. Then an update on the search for a female star to make a cameo in their upcoming Glee takeoff: Meryl Streep said no.

(See the 50 best YouTube videos of all time.)

When they launched Funny or Die, or FOD, three years ago, comedy star Will Ferrell and his producing partner Adam McKay envisioned a clearinghouse for amateur comedy videos and a place “for our friends to play.” But who knew they had so many friends? Since the website’s first hit video, “The Landlord” — a two-minute masterpiece in which Ferrell is a deadbeat tenant arguing with his bullying, profane landlord, played by McKay’s 2-year-old daughter — FOD has become a celebrity magnet to rival Vanity Fair‘s Oscar party. Justin Bieber popped by to shoot a batch of videos casting him as an out-of-control teen star. (He bought the website and renamed it Bieber or Die.) Oscar winner Marion Cotillard starred in a video wearing a pair of fake breasts on her forehead. Paris Hilton used Funny or Die to respond to John McCain’s jabs at her during the 2008 presidential campaign, Heidi Montag did one poking fun at her plastic surgery, and seven current and former Saturday Night Live impressionists got together for a “presidential reunion” sketch directed by Ron Howard to urge support for Obama’s financial-reform bill.

Watch TIME’s video on Funny or Die.

See the top 10 dubious SNL hosts.

Now agents and managers are jamming the Funny or Die phone lines, offering up their clients for a chance to be part of the hottest comedy site on the Web. The pay isn’t much — nothing, to be precise — but there are other rewards: the publicity boost when a video goes viral and the chance to show you can make fun of yourself and still be a star while doing it. “This is where people come between paying jobs,” says Farah. “It shows the power that this piece of the whole entertainment pie now commands. It’s become a real part of these people’s careers, another way to position themselves.”

Funny or Die launched in February 2007, after Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture-capital firms, approached Ferrell and McKay about starting a website devoted exclusively to comedy. At first it was filled mostly with amateur videos. (Users can vote each one up or down — “funny” or “die” — with the top picks featured on the home page.) But after “The Landlord” created a sensation (it has been viewed more than 72 million times), the operation got professional fast. Andrew Steele, a 13-year veteran of SNL, was brought in to oversee the creative shop, and Dick Glover, a former exec for ABC and NASCAR, took over as business chief. Today the site has a staff of nearly 50, produces about 20 original videos a month (in addition to some 100 a day uploaded by users) and draws an average of 7 million unique visitors a month. With the help of a growing roster of advertisers — not to mention a bare-bones, nonunion staff and free acting talent — the site is actually turning a profit: a typical FOD video costs about $2,000 to make and generates at least $3,000 in ad revenue, much more if the video is a hit. Inevitably, the brand extensions have begun: a weekly series on HBO, a pilot for Comedy Central, a live comedy tour, a movie in development and talk of producing low-budget films for download. “We think there’s an opportunity to redefine what comedy is, how it’s made and distributed,” says Glover.

(See the top 10 TV ads of 2009.)

Clubhouse for Comedy
At the very least, Funny or Die has managed to harness the explosion of comedy on the Web, give it a professional coat of paint and bring it — for better or worse — some Hollywood cachet. Ferrell and McKay, who spend most of their time making movies together, are largely absentee owners, though McKay checks in daily and Ferrell stars in the occasional video. But in building a comedy clubhouse that harks back to such collaborative satire as Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows or the early days of Saturday Night Live, they’ve created the go-to comedy site for Generation LOL.

FOD’s success is also emblematic of a sea change in comedy. Stand-ups still whine about bad dates; sitcom plots keep getting rehashed; sketch comedy continues to limp along on Saturday Night Live. But the real cutting edge has shifted to a new form: short Web videos. Many of these are simply home-movie inanities — cats acting like people or toddlers dancing to Beyoncé. But the Web has also spawned a new generation of comedy creators and an array of distinctive styles, ranging from SNL-type skits like “The Landlord” to parodies, mashups and assorted other goofs on familiar media formats — TV promos, movie trailers, music videos, iPhone commercials, viral videos. They show up on YouTube (and on sites like Barely Political, College Humor and the Onion), circulate via blogs and social-networking sites, spawn fresh variations. In the Jack Benny era, these memes — the Web-favored term — would have been known as running gags. Now everybody gets to run with them.

See an audio slide-show on the history of stand-up comedy.

See the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of 2010.

There was, for example, the slew of “Hitler Reacts” videos: re-edits of the climactic scene from the German movie Downfall in which the Führer goes ballistic after his generals give him bad news, with the subtitles rewritten to reflect whatever outrage is dominating the news at the moment — from Hillary Clinton’s imploding presidential campaign to NBC’s dumping of Conan O’Brien from The Tonight Show. So many Web smarties chimed in with their own versions that the film’s distributor, Constantin Films, finally demanded that they be taken down because of copyright infringement.

(See the top 10 late-night jokes of 2009.)

The beauty of the Hitler videos was that they could have been done nowhere but on the Web. Other popular comic themes are less unique to the medium but have reached their apotheosis there: the remixed TV promo, for example (Lost re-edited so it looks like Friends or Baywatch, or Seinfeld redone as a horror film), or the superliteral music video (old MTV hits with new lyrics that describe in ridiculously literal terms the outlandish imagery onscreen). The Internet itself has provided some of the ripest targets. Mel Gibson’s recent telephone outbursts were combined, inevitably, with Christian Bale’s audiotaped tirade on the set of Terminator: Salvation. A loopy video of a dude raving ecstatically over a rainbow in Yosemite National Park spawned a mashup with the Muppets song “Rainbow Connection.”

(See the top 10 celebrity meltdowns.)

This is comedy perfectly suited to the Internet: short, democratic, endlessly self-referential — a running satiric commentary on the media stew we’re all swimming in. “What I love about this job is that the Internet is everything,” says Funny or Die writer-actor Seth Morris, who, like several other FOD staffers, came from the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe. “It’s highs and lows. Jon Gosselin, scum-of-the-earth reality-show people, Oscar winner Ron Howard. I feel like I’m closer to the times I’m living in.”

Fending Off Stars
Funny or Die has been smart about generating buzz, especially by combining celebrities with political advocacy. (Jack Black, John C. Reilly and Neil Patrick Harris appeared in an elaborate 2008 high-school-musical spoof to protest Proposition 8, California’s gay-marriage ban.) But the influx of Hollywood star power has its downside as well: providing made-to-order videos for celebrities shopping for buzz is hardly in the renegade spirit of the Web. “If someone has a bad idea, we’ll probably figure out a way not to do it,” says Steele. “On the other hand, we don’t like to reject people when they’re putting themselves, and their own minds and creativity, out for free.”

(See the 50 best websites of 2009.)

Still, the site manages to subvert the Hollywood ethos even as it buys into it — as in Zach Galifianakis’ portrayal of a surly, inept cable-talk-show host in his brilliant “Between Two Ferns” or Brett Gelman’s superunctuous star encounters in his “Mr. Celebrity” series. And even as the productions grow more elaborate (like “Brostitute,” a slick, funny docu-parody in which Tim Roth stars as a pimp for guys cruising for male buddies), FOD hasn’t lost its scrappy, spontaneous spirit. When an aspiring Alabama agriculture commissioner named Dale Peterson caused an Internet sensation with an over-the-top campaign ad, writer-director Jake Szymanski found a horse, cast himself in the lead role and turned around a parody in a day.

“Sometimes it’s better to do a video at 80% right now than 100% if it takes five days,” says Szymanski, a Northwestern University grad who started uploading videos to Funny or Die when it launched, then got hired as the site’s third full-time employee. “It’s that vibe of picking up on the first funny joke you heard from your friend. You’re grabbing on to the collective unconscious.” And sometimes, of course, getting grabbed by it. “The Internet is the modern-day freak show,” says Szymanski. “Your funny, smart, three-minute video can always get beaten by a cat with a printer.” Yeah, but mash it up with Mel Gibson and you’ve got a comedy classic.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.