Funny Business Goes Online
The comedy and music team of Stuckey & Murray (www.stuckeyandmurray.com) met while working in NBC’s page program; they also became early adopters of online video. Their video "Unicorn in C Major" was an early YouTube hit. Combining original music with comedy has helped their work stand out, and it has other benefits as well.
"A lot of our songs are also downloadable on iTunes, so if they like the song in the video they will often buy the song, which is great ’cause then you get paid twice, so to speak," says Andy Stuckey. "You get paid to make the video and then get paid again. You’re double-dipping, so to speak, which is everybody’s goal. That’s actually a sex move Murray invented."
"Yeah, I’m the king of double-dipping," adds Jon Murray.
Figure 4. Combining original music with comedy has helped Jon Murray’s and Andy Stuckey's work stand out, and ithas other benefits as well: They also offer their songs for sale on iTunes.Before a video can get noticed by casting agents, it helps if it’s already been noticed by millions of other people. Here’s where online comedy has a huge edge over comedy club performances: It can go viral. People can easily pass along their favorite clips or embed them into their own websites.
"‘Unicorn’ was really what hit huge for us," says Murray. "We got, what, four million hits in a month, I think."
"When that video came out, it shut down our web site," adds Stuckey. "We had to buy a bunch of bandwidth. And that’s when we realized like, whoa, there’s a lot of people that are starved for content, especially short, funny videos. That many people going to our web site surprised us."
Barats’ and Bereta’s early viral hit was "Mother’s Day," while Derrick had a hit with a video that poked fun at Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator.
"A video called ‘Bro Rape’ was the first one where people were really listening to it and it gets referenced a lot," says Glover.
As the producer for Funny or Die (www.funnyordie.com), Mike Farah knows the importance of breaking new talent. While his site is best-known for the original videos he creates with major stars such as Zac Efron and Lindsay Lohan, there’s more to it than that.
"Funny or Die, in addition to those exclusive videos, is also a place where people come and upload their own original content, and we take it really seriously that we can feature and focus on some of those undiscovered kids who are out there making funny videos, putting them on the home page and giving them an editorial presence," Farah says. "We have a whole section of that on our front page."
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