Is the web transforming comedy? The latest chat from the States suggests, not for the first time, we're on the threshold of a revolution.
And the cyber-Lenin, the Mao of mirth, the Danton of the digital chuckle is ... well, it's Will Ferrell. Who else? The star of such Hollywood classics as Blades of Glory and, er, Bewitched is the public face of a new website, FunnyOrDie.com, set up by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in cahoots with the big-hitting Creative Artists Agency. The site showcases videos from both established and upcoming comic talent - and Ferrell's own most recent contribution, a 2min 30s short called The Landlord, has already been viewed a cool 30m times.
If the Russian revolution had been half as tentative as this cyber-comedy one, the tsar would still be in situ. We've been hearing for ages that the internet will change the way we experience comedy, and open doors for wannabe gagsmiths. The most recent developments saw Jimmy Carr become the first comic to perform a gig in the virtual realm Second Life, last January.
But Carr is no start-up stand-up. And, while there are plenty of young clowns whose careers have been helped by a MySpace presence (Russell Howard, Tim Minchin), I can't think of any who surfed to success on the internet alone. I don't count the occasional flash-in-the-pan fad, such as the elevation to fleeting prominence two years ago of the so-called comedy band Amateur Transplants, with their mean-spirited song about the London Underground.
We wait in vain, it seems, for the comedy equivalents of the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen or the awful Sandi Thom - whose supposedly out-of-the-blue cyber-success, by the way, depended in large part on altogether un-virtual, old-fashioned PR.
I don't doubt that, over time (or maybe it's already happening?) internet developments will see comedy evolve in surprising, and hopefully democratic, ways. And that ways of watching and making comedy will emerge that are far newer and more radical than the current fashion for YouTube-style DIY sketches - an old model in new clothes, after all, made by those eager to impress rather than subvert the powers-that-be.
In the meantime, Ferrell's new website has ratcheted up the e-hype. But a reality check is only a few clicks away. Ferrell's hit sketch, in which his abusive landlord is played by a two-year-old girl, is badly unfunny. The irresistible impression is that FunnyOrDie.com (die, Ferrell, die!) is simply a home for idle off-cuts that aren't good enough for the telly. And it is policed by the same old gatekeepers.
If comedy is going to be revolutionised, it's unlikely to happen at the hands of Will Ferrell, Creative Artists Agency and some Silicon Valley financiers.
