The Internet seems to have grown up as the original comedy network. Of the bandwidth not taken up with patently hilarious offers to get rich quick by duping 10 of your friends into duping 10 of theirs, and pictures posted to rib-tickling destinations like alt.sex.boredom - about half goes to passing jokes around to your email pals. Yet despite - or maybe because of - that fact, hardly anyone has been able to successfully bring humor to the Web.
There are a plethora of promotional sites for the professionally funny and shrines to the icons of geek humor that allow the pictures on your average info-worker's screen to match the faded paper ones taped to his cubicle wall. But the consistently funny, regularly updated source of laughs is a rare thing indeed.
Using the idea that perhaps Internet humor works best as a folk art - with masses of the untrained trading their own jokes - the year-old Conk site is concentrating on its identity as a community rather than a publication. "The viewers say you guys shouldn't even run the magazine," says Conk creative director James Touchi-Peters, who is relaunching a slightly souped-up version of the site this week.
Touchi-Peters claims that the site's daily content - a hodgepodge of annotated newspaper headlines and satirically captioned photos - is just a cue for the viewers to work from, and the site's bulletin boards get as much traffic as the magazine. And true to the email pedigree of e-humor, the site's electronic greeting cards draw a quarter of its online traffic. The next step in Conk's evolution will be the introduction of free homepages starting next month, making the site a sort of a GeoCities for the clown class.
With hackneyed Yoko jokes making up a quarter of Wednesday's Conk headlines, it's probably best that the site's staff of 10 writers, including sometimes-stand-up comic Touchi-Peters and three former Conk posters - leaves content production largely in the hands of the users. Though it's questionable whether bulletin boards and Web pages full of the ravings of Conk fans - without a filtering device as rigorous as the Darwinian process of email-propagation - will really be that useful either.
Indeed without that self-selecting aspect of folk art in which only most worthwhile material is passed through the generations, new-media comedy might still be best left to the professionals. This works for the Onion, one of the few consistently amusing sites on the Net, which for the past year and a half has been porting its ersatz news stories directly from the 100,000-circulation satirical weekly paper it has published since 1988.
In fact, the online version was launched in direct response to the vast number of unattributed Onion articles - including the classic "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia" - floating around by email and Usenet.
Onion webmaster Jack Szwergold attributes the difficulties of online mirth - and the Onion's success within it - to "general online attention spans." "It's hard," he says, "to ask people to sit and stare at a screen."
The Onion's format fits that environment intrinsically, just by the nature of a news story's inverted-pyramid structure. Surfers can enjoy the site as a list of unlikely headlines, get the kernel of the joke in a story's lead, or read as deeply into a piece as they have an inclination for. "You don't have to commit yourself," Szwergold explains.
It's the same easy-access formula that works for Suck, with its single daily item, Szwergold adds. And it doesn't hurt that the articles about such surrealist conceits as Mother Teresa being condemned to hell by clerical error are reported in perfect, unwavering news-speak. It's the same verisimilitude of the email currently making the rounds that has a fake Microsoft press-release announcing the company's acquisition of the federal government. Thus, the Onion has built a site which garners 130,000 daily page-views without really doing much of anything. And it doesn't plan to do much else to its online content in the future, aside from the usual design tweaks. As Szwergold says, "There's no reason to mess around with it."
If he did want to do anything, he might want to consider outright lists. Any top-10 list of email bits would have to include at least five top-10 lists itself. And while Touchi-Peters claims to be building a Tonight show of the Internet - that is, a source of jokes to shared at the water cooler the next morning - he might find a better model in David Letterman's Late Show. Here, topical joke-telling has been reduced to the trademarked list of 10 written humor-nuggets for the information-overloaded who find a five-minute introductory ramble too taxing a way to receive 10 punchlines. And made into something easily posted to Letterman newsgroups.
It also makes up what is perennially the most popular feature on the Late Show Web site, despite all attempts to beef up the rest of the site. Even on the feature-rich AOL version - which includes a 30-second comic bit by Letterman after the TV show's taping every night - the list rules. "People clamor for that sort of thing," says Letterman online producer Walter Kim. Make-your-own lists are virtually the only popular interactive portion, as well - boding well for Touchi-Peters' approach. "People are so familiar with it," says Kim's co-producer, Jay Johnson. And though, he says they are "not willing to get out of their chairs" and do anything more active than a little simple typing, "everybody's a comedian."
As far as making the rest of the site more interactive, Johnson says, "We've been trying to find a way that makes it successful. A year later we're still trying." Perhaps the difficulty is part of what the Onion's Szwergold calls "just this incredible obsession with multimedia." People don't want to do to much work to get to a quick chuckle, and that's why a shameless Suck rip-off like Rant can be a more satisfying experience than the elaborate Hecklers Online. The limiting paradox, says Szwergold, is that "people want flash, they want bells and whistles, but they don't realize there's a price to pay."
Conk might not be particularly handsome or shockingly multimedia, but Touchi-Peters insists that "it's intended to be downloaded by the home 28.8 modem." And that counts for something in the online funny business, where he who laughs last might not stick around to laugh at all.
