Funny Business Goes Online
The College Humor Story
In the world of online video comedy, one site stands apart for the level of work it creates, the talent it employs, and the new areas that it’s expanding into. CollegeHumor (www.collegehumor.com) was founded in 1999 by Ricky Van Veen and Josh Abramson, originally as a best-of-the-web type of site that linked to humorous articles on other sites. As similar sites started to appear, College Humor’s creators decided to distinguish their site by offering original articles. A few years later, they began offering original video as well.
Sam Reich was hired in 2006 as the first member of the site’s original video department. With a background in both theater and online video (Reich is a member of Dutch West, along with Carroll), he needed to play all the roles at first, writing, producing, and editing the site’s nascent video efforts.
"There were some sites like SuperDeluxe and DotComedy that were devoted to original content popping up," Reich says. "Those sites have since folded." CollegeHumor is now one of the few sites that regularly produces new online comedy videos.
Figure 5. Sam Reich (top center, in glasses) was the first member of CollegeHumor’s original video department,which he has since grown to 25 staffers who produce 10 videos a week.While the last 3 years were marked with a great deal of trial and error, Reich has grown the staff to 25 and increased his workload from one to 10 videos every week. His team consistently turns out the most-talked-about videos online.
"The riddle we’ve been trying to answer all these years is how do you make a comedy viral video?" Reich asks.
"I think tastes on the internet are becoming more refined, so people aren’t just using the internet to watch the crazy cat video," he says. "They’re also watching television online, they’re also going to sites like ours or The Onion or Funny or Die for original content. We want to be a part of that collective."
Reich credits his staff for taking play seriously and keeping the site fresh. "We have writing meetings every week, and when you’re stuck in a room for two hours with your buddies, you’re hopefully going to come up with stuff that makes you laugh," he says. "That’s sort of the most important thing, that you don’t get on automatic pilot."
CollegeHumor has been so successful that it’s now growing beyond the web. You might have caught the first season of its MTV show, which ran a few months back and featured much of the site’s editorial staff playing themselves. Reich is optimistic that the show will be picked up for a second season. His team is also pitching another TV show to a different network and is working on a movie.
The CollegeHumor video department has even taken on a new challenge lately: commercial work.
"Recently, we have started to think of ourselves more as a production company and less just as a part of the web site, and for the first time have started to take on projects for that end," Reich says. "For instance, we just did a series of Pepsi spots that are going to air on Hulu and which have no association with the web site whatsoever."
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