Laugh and the web laughs with you

IT IS A COMEDIC TRUTH universally acknowledged that Alan Partridge is one of the most brilliant characters of this or any other televisual generation. The BBC radio and TV series he appeared in ended in 2002.

When Steve Coogan came up with new material for his character, he found that most channels now prefer the comedy-roadshow format, for which a bunch of stand-ups sanitise their greatest hits. Somewhat ignominiously, Coogan had to rely on a beer company to get another airing for Alan Partridge: the new sketches, in which the DJ has been banished to a Norfolk digital radio station, have been hosted by the Foster’s Funny website (fostersfunny.co.uk). Last year it was the first show exclusively available online to be nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award.

Coogan and his cowriter Armando Ianucci are talking to terrestrial broadcasters about bringing the show, called Mid Morning Matters, to TV: an early demonstration, in what will become a growing trend, of internet content moving to a more traditional medium. Foster's Funny has now enlisted Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, whose Afternoon Delightsgoes online on Monday. Expect them to be back on mainstream TV before the end of the year.

The internet has changed everything for comedy. All that is innovative and cutting edge is being played out on the web, whether it is through comedy sites such as Funny or Die (funnyordie.com) or sketch groups using YouTube to showcase their material.

The Irish writer and director John Butler, who was behind RTÉ's Your Bad Selfsketch show last year, says, "TV commissioners aren't going anywhere near comedy programmes these days because of the cost. You have an awful lot of location work, an awful lot of writing – you have to generate a huge amount of material for a sketch show – and there are many actors involved. Plus the shooting and editing of the material takes far longer. For Your Bad Selfwe had 14 actors and shot for 20 days, sometimes having to shoot six or seven sketches a day – and the rate of attrition is very high, which is why you don't see sketch comedy on TV these days: its natural home now is the web."

Butler salutes RTÉ's response. "They've been very quick to recognise how programmes can be generated from the internet. Their Hardy Bucksshow came out of their Storylandseries [rte.ie/storyland], in which people submitted a six-minute video episode to an RTÉ website, with one show being voted off each week. I think that migration from web to TV, as with the Alan Partridge show, is interesting and is full of possibilities."

Bren Berry, who books comedy for Vicar Street and is the director of this month’s Vodafone Comedy Festival, in Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens, agrees that sketch groups and, particularly, musical comedy acts stand to gain most from the internet.

"I have a musical act coming to the comedy festival called Reggie Watts, who is a YouTube star thanks to his videos. He's a real example of someone who has gone viral on the back of his web work. There's also the musical duo Garfunkel and Oates, who have a massive online following," he says, referring to a US pair who have been signed by HBO (garfunkelandoates.com), after their YouTube videos led to a spot on The Jay Leno Show.

"You see things being done very differently now," says Berry. "For example, there's a five-piece Dublin sketch group called Diet of Worms (puffincat.blogspot.com), and they have a series of comedy sketches called Taste of Homeup on the web which were sponsored by Denny. It's all about profile building and using the web to let people know what you're capable of. There's another Irish sketch group called Dead Cat Bounce who have also built up a following from their web content."

That web presence helped earn Dead Cat Bounce (deadcatbounce.ie) an invitation to perform at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival and the Melbourne Comedy festival.

The biggest new web sensation are the UK musical comedy group Midnight Beast. Their Tik Tokparody of a song by the rapper Ke$ha has had 12 million hits on YouTube. They are now a staple booking for music festivals and are able to put on national tours. Watch out also for the fast-growing Badly Drawn Roy, set in a working-class Dublin suburb, which has been picked up by the BBC.

FOR STAND-UP COMICS,though, the web is problematic. English comedian Milton Jones says that when he is on the BBC show Mock the Weekhe often stays away from the microphone if he has come up with something good, as he would prefer to keep it for his own set.

“I’ve done shows and gone home only to find my best bit of material from that night’s show already up on YouTube,” he says. “The thing I don’t like about the web, and a lot of stand-ups feel the same, is that often the footage of you performing is really grainy and bad quality and has been taken by somebody at the very back of the room.

“It is double edged, though: people have joined in when I’m saying things because they’ve seen a clip online of me doing that gag. Then you get people who request material that they’ve seen me doing on a YouTube clip. You just have to prepare yourself for the fact that anything you say on TV is going to end up online and, as such, is dead to me, in that I can’t be seen to be using ‘old’ jokes.

“And I really don’t like it when whole tracts of my show are put up online. In the past you could get a good two years out of a really tight 40-minute set, but you have to turn over the material so much quicker these days.”

The US comic Bo Burnham is widely credited with being the first YouTube comedian. His clips have amassed more than 75 million hits and led to a deal for a comedy album, but Bren Berry says talk of YouTube sensations sometimes doesn’t bear scrutiny. “Unlike sketch acts or musical acts, the stand-up’s online presence doesn’t necessarily transfer to ticket sales. Bo Burnham is a fantastically funny comic, but I’m really not sure if he would sell out Vicar Street.”

The future, everyone agrees, is Funny or Die, the comedy-video website. Set up by Will Ferrell, it has both original material, often exclusive videos featuring the likes of Judd Apatow, and user-generated content. Unlike other sites, it has a voting system. If 80 per cent of viewers or more rate a video as funny after 100,000 views, it gets an Immortal ranking; 20 per cent or less after 1,000 views and your work is shunted to the dreaded Crypt section of the site. Its first video, Landlord, featuring Ferrell being hassled for rent by a swearing and alcohol-swilling two-year-old, has been viewed 80 million times.

Funny or Die has already spawned a live tour, and HBO bought a stake in the company after persuading the site to provide it with original comedy programming. Speaking about the HBO deal, Ferrell, said, “I don’t want to overstate the importance of this deal, but this is the missing-link moment where TV and internet finally merge. It will change the way we as human beings perceive and interact with reality. Okay, I overstated it. But it is an exciting deal.”

So, no, TV and the internet haven’t merged, but, in the comedy world at least, there’s a blurring of boundaries and a glimpse of how one medium feeds into, and off, another.

Crossing comedy and the internet

The Eleventh Hour and Terminal 2A huge amount of money was spent building Dublin airport's shiny new Terminal 2. More was spent on the advertising that told us how it chimed with our culture and heritage. Barry Murphy of Après Matchspent virtually nothing making a parody of it, and when the two ads went head to head on YouTube, Murphy's work attracted more hits than the official version (search for "The Eleventh Hour 19th Minute: DAA").

Record-breaking podcastsEver since Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington set a Guinness world record for the most-downloaded podcast, comics have been taking the audio route to raise their profiles. Gervais et al's record has now been broken by the US comic Adam Carolla(adamcarolla.com). His podcast is fantastically funny but perhaps not for sensitive types. Moving in quickly on Carolla is another US comic, Marc Maron, whose brilliant podcasts (wtfpod.com) are gaining huge audiences.

The Vodafone Comedy Festival is at Iveagh Gardens from July 21st to 24th; vodafonecomedy.com