2011 has been a landmark year for comedy. With the internet smashing any barrier to entry that may have once existed, content saturation is higher than ever. And that’s a boon to a comedy lover like myself! With greater quantity inevitably comes more chances to come across comic productions of great quality - which was certainly the case this year. Even top comedians like Louis CK have taken advantage of the ease of distribution the web affords, opting, in a daring experiment, to eliminate the middleman and release and promote his most recent stand up special (Live at the Beacon Theatre) through the internet - marketing on Reddit, merchandising solely through PayPal - and the experiment paid off. We - lovers, producers, and consumers of comedy - truly live in an exciting time - as is demonstrated by the videos below, my five favorites of 2011…
The acerbic wit of stand up comic and sketch writer Jena Friedman was on full display in the clip above - a pitch perfect New York Times Wedding Announcement parody, in which a sweet, unassuming bride-to-be and her creepy, sociopathic fiance brag about their pending nuptials in true yuppie fashion. This clip along with others of Friedman’s I’ve featured this year were enough to get the attention of Late Night host Dave Letterman (who of network late night host has, arguably, one of the darker sensibilities), who recently added Jena to his writing staff. Had it not been for her viral videos and impressive body of work distributed almost solely through the internet, who knows if Friedman would have found the well-deserved success she achieved this year!
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer have been dumping delightful videos into the internet for what seems like forever. Their webseries - Broad City - has grown from a quirky, clever, web series, the tale of ordinary girls in NYC to - most recently - a show being produced by Amy Poehler for FX next year. In 2011, I featured a number of videos from the talented women behind Broad City. I knew they were destined for a more broad audience and can’t wait to see the show next year. Congrats, ladies!
The critical acclaim of Fred Armisen’s Portlandia isn’t exactly a story of local-kid-makes-good, but when you learn that the show’s antecedent was a web series called ThunderAnt that not many people have ever seen, things come into focus. Armisen has been a cast member of SNL for over a decade and has carved a niche playing strange, esoteric characters. Pair that with Carrie Brownstein’s indie cred and outsider sensibility and the writing of former Colbert Report and Daily Show scribe Allison Silverman, you’ve got a hit. IFC took a chance on a show whose audience was guaranteed to be small from the start because of the little web series that could. It’s no wonder they believed in the project based on the ThunderAnt sketch above - and the others I’ve posted in the Comic Appeal channel this year. Just in time for the new year, the second season of Portlandia premieres in the first week of January.
Issa Rae came out of nowhere in 2011 to produce one of the most watched web series of the year - The Misadventures of the AWKWARD Black Girl. On the heels of her success, she’s been featured on CNN and just about every site where videos are embeddable. By her own admission, Rae tapped into a market to which no one had catered comedically: she created “the Black Liz Lemon”. If rumors are to be believed, we should be seeing Issa on the small screen very soon.
It’s impossible to estimate just how many Louis CK videos I’ve shared on Redux this year - and even more difficult would be to choose a favorite. What’s not hard to believe is why this man has found so much success. An autodidact and jack of nearly all trades, Louis CK can tackle a controversial topic like no other comic alive: race, politics, religion, and any other subject on which lesser comics would fear to tread are handled deftly in Louis’ hands. Not only that, but his history of being self-sufficient (an filmmaking, camera-operating, animating, writer, who can probably juggle and speak Aramaic - wouldn’t put it past him, honestly) garnered him an unprecedented unsupervised deal for Louie with FX. It’s great seeing bits I recognized from his old web videos and stand up specials (helicopter escapes and “a bag of d!cks”) show up on his new show. If this year was any indication, obviously, this is just the beginning and I’m excited to see what Louis has in store next.
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