No Laughing Matter

Comedy Central is still number one in its cable category. From that spot you can only go down.

John McCain was recently making his fourteenth appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. After a brief round of small talk Stewart digs in. "Everybody knows Senator Barack Obama has a problem with the Reverend Wright issue," he begins. "You, sir, have your own religious I don't want to say 'zealot' but a religious person endorsing your campaign." McCain leans in for the punch line. "Will you take this opportunity to repudiate and denounce President Bush?" McCain rises and pretends to flee the stage. The crowd goes wild.

Fleeing the stage--that's Comedy Central's worst nightmare when it comes to The Daily Show. "When I see Jon Stewart talking to people from other networks, it's like a girlfriend thing," says Douglas Herzog, president of MTV Networks Entertainment Group, which includes Comedy Central, a subsidiary of Viacom (nyse: VIA

My competitive and protective instincts kick in."

Herzog may be exaggerating his fear of a Stewart defection ("Like, cold sweats, wake up in the middle of the night, bolt up, Oh my God, honey, sell the house "). But his underlying paranoia is real. It's the result of building a network around a few indispensable personalities. Comedy Central is the king of the coveted 18- to 34-year-old-male demographic. The Daily Show and its spinoff, The Colbert Report, beat out Leno, Letterman and Conan with these young men. New episodes of South Park, another Comedy Central hit, lead their prime-time slot among 18- to 34-year-old males.

But Comedy Central, created in 1990 after a merger of channels from hbo and Viacom, has a lot of mouths to feed. Its astonishing success--22 million subscribers tune in; last year the network pulled in $450 million in ad revenue, 9.5% of MTV Networks' total--creates a voracious appetite for more. Its digital strategy, like that of everyone else, is to distribute its programs across as many media as possible in order to supplement cable TV advertising with Web, online videogame and cell phone ads, and CDs and DVDs. That, in turn, cranks up demand for content. "We're always looking for that hit that's going to become a cultural phenomenon," says Lauren Corrao, Comedy Central's head of development. Or, more bluntly, "at a level now that it can service all of those platforms."

Hence the angst about losing guys like Stewart and Stephen Colbert, not to mention South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. But relying on personalities is perilous, as the network's experience with comedian Dave Chappelle illustrates. Once providing sketch comedy for his TV show and its bestselling DVD, he abruptly quit in May 2005, citing dissatisfaction with the show's direction.

In order to discover new galaxies of stars, Comedy Central has built a farm system. Newbies can perform in two- to five-minute online shows, which cost $1,000 to $10,000 to produce and are one way the network is leading a shift in comedy toward shorter, video-based performances. Example: Demetri Martin, who started out, in 2001, with other comedians on the network's half-hour stand-up showcase, Premium Blend (now called Live at Gotham). From there, Martin got his own half-hour stand-up special. In 2005 he became a contributor to The Daily Show, and in 2006 Comedy Central Records released his CD. Last year he had an hourlong special, later released on DVD via Comedy Central Home Entertainment. Finally, Martin hit the jackpot when Comedy Central greenlighted his own half-hour weekly TV series, Important Things With Demetri Martin, which launches next year.

At any given time Comedy Central has ten shows in development, deploying a bicoastal group of 11 to hunt for new talent--in comedy clubs, in films, on TV and on the Web. Fertile ground: video Web sites like Will Farrell's Funnyordie.com, Mydamnchannel.com and YouTube. Friday afternoon is the deadline for sending pitches to development chief Corrao. In this way, she "discovered" Evan Mann and Gareth Reynolds, who had posted a four-minute clip of themselves at a mock poker tournament on YouTube. They then did a live show at the Comedy Central stage in L.A. and later produced a five-minute video at a bull-testicle-eating festival for Comedycentral.com. They now have a pilot script in development for a weekly TV series.

Trouble is, everyone's sifting the same material. "I lose sleep over the question, 'Are we missing that next big thing?''' says Corrao. The trick is having "the talent seek you out."

As consumers migrate to the Web on laptops and handhelds, the essential challenge for the entertainment industry is how to make them happy--and paying--customers. Comedy Central has some cost advantages. A show that can be used at least twice (Web and cable TV) costs $500,000 to $1 million per episode, compared with $2 million to $3 million for a network drama. Moreover, programs like, say, South Park can be easily sliced into snippets and sent to TVs, laptops, iPods, Xboxes and mobile phones.

Making money at all is still a mystery. Parent company Viacom decided that in order to do so, it first had to wrestle back control. After portions of Comedy Central began appearing on YouTube in 2005, Viacom pulled 100,000 clips and sued, seeking $1 billion in damages. (The case is in discovery in federal court in New York.) Then it larded its own sites, like thedailyshow.com, which includes 16,000 tagged clips of the show, part of a database that will soon be searchable by episode or topic. Advertisers can now buy a collection of clips, as Infiniti did, with so-called classic moments from The Daily Show.

Getting those ads is critical--especially because Comedy Central lags behind competitors in subscriber fees. That's an albatross left over from its days as a love child of Viacom and Time Warner (nyse: TWX

Digital revenue, Comedy Central claims, has tripled since 2005 to an undisclosed amount.

Meantime, though, other players, like Hulu.com--which was founded by NBC Universal and News Corp--are offering a greater variety of free content, including Comedy Central shows.

Nobody yet does as good a job as Comedy Central in making a household name out of the funny guy next door. The key: showing up at his doorstep before anyone else.

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