News

Funny or Die Bought Up by Designer/Philanthropist/Former DNC Finance Chair Henry R. Muñoz III

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

Yes, Funny or Die has just got bought up by someone who will likely have buildings and streets named after them, Henry R. Muñoz III.

To a good lot of you, it’s news that Funny or Die is even still around. The undeniable hub that is YouTube and the proliferation of short form content on other platforms like Vine, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Instagram, and Twitter obviously ate into what FoD used to be the center of over the last few years.

In 2007, before viral video was a widespread term in the collective unconscious, a just launched curiosity of a site, Funny or Die, had just posted The Landlord wherein FoD co-founder Will Ferrell pleads with his landlord who just happens to be his innocent, pure-as-the-drive-snow daughter.

From there, Funny or Die become quite the go-to place for short-form edgy comedy and content. Some of the best minds in sketch comedy worked there for a spell, which made for one of our all time favorite sketches, Gungan Style. In fact, it earned such a reputation in that regard that brands big and small looked to the sharp FoD staff to create viral content for them.

With the rise of all the aforementioned places for content and too much branded content, Funny or Die’s star began to fade. They tried several things to stay relevant (remember when they tried a platform where comedians could get potentially paid for jokes they would write?), the film brother and sister companies of FoD, Gary Sanchez and Gloria Sanchez (also co-founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay), fared better in recent years. Additionally, as you might have noticed, Adam McKay has become a critically acclaimed satirist with his recent filmography (Vice, The Big Short) in place of being hands on at FoD.

So, that leaves us to wonder as to what Muñoz III will do exactly with the once exalted brand with Ferrell staying on in an advisory capacity. In the past decade, one can see the likes of National Lampoon and even the cult favorite Super Deluxe get revived very briefly only to left in limbo or get dissolved yet again. Muñoz III has said:

“I understand the responsibilities of owning a brand like Funny Or Die and I am excited to work with our team to make sure we have the resources we need to develop funny, original and diverse new content. I also understand the importance of being one of the very few Latinos in a position like this in the entertainment industry and I will do my best to make my community, our industry and our country proud as we move forward.”

That is encouraging to hear, but the turnover in comedy is quite quick these days (i.e. Quibi didn’t even last a year). Let’s hope that he shakes it up the way the rest of comedy is being shaken up like it very much needed to be.

Please Enjoy Jessica Watkins Very, Very Special Comedy Doc “SPECIALish”

As art forms move forward, innovation and, in many cases, disruption is needed to fuel any sort of true growth. That is especially true of an art form of comedy that is not only subject to frequent change as it’s in comedy nature to question assumptions and expectations.

When it comes to the idea of a stand-up comedy special, especially after decades of just having a mic, mic stand, a bare stage, various sized audiences, and the comedians themselves performing, a desire for something else, something different is there and has been served more and more, even before the pandemic with Maria Bamford’s unconventional specials, Julio Torres’ My Favorite Shapes, and Whitmer Thomas’ The Golden One.

Jessica Watkins also felt that she needed to do something besides just telling jokes on stage in order to stand out with a comedy special, which is why she embarked on an entire walk across America with strategically placed comedy shows in order to make a really special special. What resulted did actually provide something truly special, but it was a far cry from what she had planned.

Through many unforeseen obstacles, circumstances, and a whole bunch of other people just, you know, walking across America, Watkins had to keep reimagining her idea of the special, tour, stand-up, creativity, drive, and purpose while making what would eventually become the beautiful documentary, SPECIALish. It actually ends up being a very self-aware, but enlightening meditation on what it means to be an artist, specifically one that goes for laughs in a dark, crowded room/bar/basement/etc. night after night as well as what it means to express your creative agency as a woman in spite of traumatic past. The several journeys within the main journey of trekking across America go so much deeper in the creative process than so many other comedy documentaries we’ve seen, specifically when it comes to the arduous path that is doing stand-up comedy on the road.

See for yourself in the official trailer for SPECIALish here.

Though it took Jessica several months to do through the journey (long, long before COVID-19), then years to put it into documentary form, it was well worth what resulted in SPECIALish, now streaminig. Please go rent/buy it here and, undoubtedly, soulfully ponder the nature of comedy and art as we did.