Jokes.com Relaunch, McDonald's Sponsorship

I’m not sure how many hours of my adolescent and teenage life I spent watching standup comedy on TV (it seemed like every channel had a standup show). But I don’t think it was a waste of time, and expect to spend more hours browsing through the newly launched Jokes.com site.

Comedy Central has revamped the site in a big way. It’s not just a facelift. They literally had multiple editorial people plowing through standup video from their archives going back about 10 years, attributing metadata to countless clips, and slicing and dicing shows into individual jokes, or thematic riffs.

Watch Bill Hicks mocking creationism on the “A-List.” Or check out Bob Odenkirk in his early (awkward?) standup days. You might have to sit through an in-stream ad first. (Sadly, they don’t have that old Brian Regan bit about little league.)

Of course, there are lots of younger (and living) comedians, too. And one of ’em, Christian Finnegan, was at the launch lunch at Comedy Central HQ yesterday (pictured here in his cool ‘Mats shirt).

Sure, all that editing and metadata-ing work facilitates SEO. But there’s another interesting and potentially revenue-generating outcome. The site’s content — which also includes text jokes and text versions of the video bits (yes, more SEO) — can be readily organized according to theme. The Comedy Central folks created hundreds of tags for Jokes.com content (George W. Bush, Gross-Out, Marriage).

That means they can easily generate a page dedicated to a certain theme or themes for a sponsor. Take McDonald’s, which will sponsor a football-themed video section in conjunction with the Superbowl.