Mar132006
Off the Web
Filed Under Aspen Comedy Festival, Funny 2.0
I’m very familiar with all these people’s work from before, so this show was a real joy for me from very beginning, which featured changing images of viral images set to an “All Your Base” song. The show focused mostly on the real sites of the creators, but the first shown was the fake internationalfanmale.lb from Todd Levin & Bob Powers (not lovers), which celebrated the models and the clothing from International Male. even though its most popular page features a three-years-too-late 9/11 tribute with a photo of a kitten on a duck on a rabbit. Adorable.
Much of the rest of the show was a combo of education/entertainment as I imagine that a fair amount of the 4:30PM Bellyup crowd wasn’t really aware of the possibilities of humor on the web from Chelsea Peretti‘s “Black People Love Us” to a clip featuring thrown scissors from College Humor (which brought a huge gasp). Charlie Todd‘s account of the beginnings of Improv Everywhere including clips from both his pranks in NY and Aspen was a huge hit. Watching mountain residents eat the “free snowcones” made from much-trod-upon snow was a thing of joy. Hopefully those people are going to get tested for, well, everything.
CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen and Jacob Lodwick pulled back the veil a bit on how they “serve up the world’s finest dick jokes” to a million monthly readers. The biggest surprise to me is that they now get paid by Big Media to put up videos from upcoming movies and shows to make them appear as if they were pirated. Their rules for successful viral videos:
- Shorter the Better
- Have a hook that comes in the first 10 seconds
- Appear obscure. Nobody wants to pass along something everyone’s already seen.
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