Get this: A couple of Ivy League wisenheimers put up a Web site on a lark, the site causes a sensation and the duo become budding new media moguls with no revenue but venture capital to burn.
It's the kind of dot-com folk tale that Modern Humorist's Web site would mercilessly spoof, except that it is, in fact, the brief history of Modern Humorist itself. Specializing in wickedly funny parodies, Modern Humorist is the brainchild of two Harvard graduates, Michael Colton and John Aboud, and, without revenue, has attracted a cult following and $1 million in venture capital."We figure the end of the economy is here if idiots like us can get money," says Mr. Aboud, the 27-year-old co-president of Modern Humorist Inc.
But while Mr. Aboud and 24-year-old Mr. Colton, the other co-president, can't keep a straight face about their newfound status as entrepreneurs, their goal is serious. They are intent on building a serious multimedia enterprise that spans book, movie, television and electronic-commerce projects.
With a corporate history that reads like a send-up of a Web start-up, those ambitions might seem overweening, particularly since the site -- www.modernhumorist.com-- published new content only erratically since its debut last month. This month, however, Modern Humorist began publishing new material online every weekday.
Pop culture is rich fodder for Modern Humorist parodies. Oprah Winfrey's new O magazine prompted the Modern Humorist to create J: The Jerry Magazine, inspired by Oprah rival Jerry Springer. Among J's offerings: "Travel: Where to find women who will fight over men with bad skin and no job" and "Connect With Your Friends: Sleep With Their Lovers." At the bottom of J's table of contents is an inspirational message: "Take care of yourself and each other, but if it doesn't work out, call 1-800-Springer."
For Mother's Day, the Modern Humorist composed a collection of mock cards for the eternally spiteful child. Picture mom reading this: "An epidural was only the beginning" -- she opens the card -- "of the numbness that is our relationship."
Another Mother's Day greeting has the words "We don't want to see you growing old alone ... " on the front and continues inside with " ... That is why we've sold your things and put you in a home."
"They're hopelessly, screamingly, brutally funny," says one fan, Jesse Kornbluth, editorial director of America Online Inc.
Messrs. Colton and Aboud have a knack for building buzz. Earlier this year, before the official launch of the Modern Humorist site, they created a dead-on takeoff of MediaGossip.com, a Web site religiously visited by members of the press that has since been renamed and can now be found at www.medianews.org. Messrs. Colton and Aboud deliberately selected a target that would get other media talking about them.
"That was our press release," Mr. Colton says. "Show don't tell." (Among the parody's items was one informing readers that The Wall Street Journal's "front-page halftone illustrations will now depict the boils, moles, nose veins, eczema patches and uni-brows so common among the business class.")
A year ago, Messrs. Colton and Aboud were working for more serious-minded publications -- Mr. Colton for Brill's Content, Mr. Aboud for TV Guide Online. For laughs, the two men -- who both worked for Harvard's storied humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon -- decided to revive a Lampoon tradition of making fun of another publication.
The result was a parody of a promotional campaign by Talk magazine, the heavily hyped monthly then only weeks away from its launch by Walt Disney Co.'s Miramax unit. Among the parody's descriptive material was "WHO IS TALK," explained (in part) thusly: "Talk is a foreigner, often a mysterious foreigner, who kills for pleasure." Within hours of going online, the Talk parody was mentioned by the Drudge Report. Other news stories followed.
Mr. Colton's employer, for one, was not amused that a staffer was spending so much time on an unapproved project. "I was almost fired by Steven Brill," says Mr. Colton, referring to the chairman and chief executive officer of Brill's Content. "They felt I was not giving enough of my time to Brill's. They were probably right."
Mr. Brill says one of his chief concerns was that the parody would be confused with a Brill's Content project, though he admits he thought it was funny.
The response to the media stunt convinced Messrs. Colton and Aboud that they were onto something. "We said, 'Maybe we can sustain this,"' Mr. Aboud recalls, meaning: Maybe we can quit our day jobs.
A series of connections led them to Louis Giliberti, a consultant in the media and entertainment practice at $ Web/CKS Corp. (now called MarchFirst Inc.) in New York. Mr. Giliberti helped the duo develop a business plan for a company using the Web as a springboard into other media. He also introduced them to a venture-capital firm, Carlin Ventures, which agreed to invest about $1 million in the new enterprise.
Mr. Giliberti kicked in $150,000 of his own money. He has since joined the company as a part-time chief executive. Although he doesn't draw a salary, he has received a chunk of equity.
Greg Scholl, a partner at Carlin, says he expects Modern Humorist to make money through online advertising and syndication deals with other publications for its material.
Other possibilities are video games, humor books and movies bearing the Modern Humorist brand. That strategy is similar to the approach followed by the Onion, which began as a satirical newspaper published in Madison, Wis., and then developed a much wider audience through a Web site and two books.
David O'Connor, a partner at Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles who is also a Modern Humorist board member, plans to represent the company in discussions with book publishers and other media. Modern Humorist has a chance to become a "National Lampoon for the Web," Mr. O'Connor says, adding: "They're genuinely funny, and funny really works. I think there are very, very few comedy franchises out there, and they are precious where they exist."
Still, Mr. Scholl, the venture capitalist, acknowledges that "content bets" are risky. The Modern Humorist may be riskier than most. The site has no track record as a business, since it hasn't even begun selling advertisements. Mr. Scholl recalls with amusement that his sense of the venture's risks wasn't allayed when he handed Messrs. Colton and Aboud the investment check and they made a crack about blowing it all on sex and drugs. (Mr. Colton confirms the incident.)
Part of the money went to hiring a small squad of comedy writers and designers. The group works out of offices in an industrial neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront known as Dumbo (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). A white board stands in the corner of the office with the words "data functionality" and "vertical integration" scrawled across it. Mr. Colton calls the terms "gobbledygook" that he felt a dot-com start-up should use.
Even the perennial jokester Mr. Colton can't help sounding like a red-blooded Internet entrepreneur at times. He talks excitedly about using the Modern Humorist brand to "leverage into off-line content." But then the seriousness fades. "Whenever I find myself slipping into that speech, I say, 'What are you talking about?"'
Seconding that attitude, Noam Weinstein, a Modern Humorist senior writer, quickly scratches out a drawing on a piece of yellow legal notepad. Entitled "the Modern Humorist business plan," the drawing is a graph showing Success on a vertical axis, Time on a horizontal axis and an upward-curving line indicating the bright future of the company.