CollegeHumor: Information from Answers.com

This article is about the comedy website. For the TV series based on the website, see The CollegeHumor Show. For other uses, see College Humor.

CollegeHumor

URL	http://www.collegehumor.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Entertainment website
Registration	Optional
Owner	IAC/InterActiveCorp
Created by	Josh Abramson, Ricky Van Veen
Launched	1999

CollegeHumor is a comedy website based in New York City. The site features daily original comedy videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. In early 2009, CollegeHumor's editorial staff wrote and starred in their own TV show, The CollegeHumor Show, on MTV.

CollegeHumor is operated by Connected Ventures, a New York company that also owns Defunker, BustedTees, Sports Pickle, and Vimeo.^[1]

1 History
2 Features
3 CH Originals
4 The CollegeHumor Show
5 Books
6 References
7 External links

History

The site was created in 1999 by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen. Abramson and Van Veen were high school friends from Baltimore, Maryland. Site traffic averages over 7 million monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast direct measurement.^[2]

According to Fox News, "[We wanted to start] an advertisement-based business," Abramson said, "because at the time the advertising market was pretty hot and we’d seen other people develop Web sites that were popular making a lot of money." Their aim was to create a humor site that would appeal to the advertiser-friendly college-aged demographic.^[3]

CollegeHumor, along with its parent company, Connected Ventures, was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in August 2006.^{[citation needed]}

In recent years, the site has become known for its original comedy content. In 2008, CollegeHumor was nominated for a Webby Award in the Humor category.^[4] Their videos Awkward Rap and Hand Vagina were nominated for the Webby Award for Best Comedy: Individual Short or Episode in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

Features

Videos

CollegeHumor produces original comedy videos under the CH Originals (formerly known as CHTV) banner. In addition, the site hosts a large collection of user-submitted viral videos, encompassing home movies, bizarre sports highlights, sketches, and the like.

Pictures

CollegeHumor's Pictures section features user-submitted photographs. Like the site's videos, CollegeHumor's pictures are of a humorous or bizarre nature. CollegeHumor also occasionally holds photo-based contests for its users. CollegeHumor also provides a hottest/cutest college girl contest almost every day throughout the year.

Articles

CollegeHumor posts original writing from its staff and users, including humorous essays, comics, interviews and weekly columns on sports, video games, college life, and dating. Contributing writers to the site include notable comedians Christian Finnegan, David Wain, Paul Scheer, and Judah Friedlander.

CH Originals

CH Originals is CollegeHumor's original comedy video section, featuring sketches and short films written and produced by the CollegeHumor staff. The site releases over ten new videos per week. CH Originals videos include sketch comedy, film and television parodies, animation, and music videos. In addition to stand-alone viral comedy shorts or "one-offs," which are usually shot on location and feature hired actors, CH Originals also produces a number of series - notably "Hardly Working," "Jake and Amir," and "Bleep Bloop" - which are shot in the CH office and star the CH staff members themselves. ^[5]

CollegeHumor's original videos average over 17 million views per month on the site. In addition, their videos are collected on the CollegeHumor YouTube Channel, which currently has over 500,000 subscribers. ^[6].

CH Originals produces The Michael Showalter Showalter, a Charlie Rose-style comedic interview series hosted by Michael Showalter. Past guests on the show include Paul Rudd, Andy Samberg, David Cross, and Michael Cera.

In 2008, the CH Originals series "Street Fighter: The Later Years" was nominated for "Best Series" by YouTube's Video Awards ^[7].

CH Originals' "Prank War" series, which documents the escalating practical jokes between two members of the CollegeHumor staff (Streeter Seidell and Amir Blumenfeld), gained national notoriety after one of the two employees staged a public marriage proposal to the other's girlfriend on his behalf. The incident was known as “The Yankee Prankee," and was later featured on VH1's "40 Greatest Pranks Part 2." ^[8]

The CollegeHumor Show

Main article: The CollegeHumor Show

On December 17th, 2008, CollegeHumor.com announced The CollegeHumor Show, a scripted comedy that premiered on MTV on February 8, 2009.^[9] The half-hour comedy is written by and stars nine actual CollegeHumor.com editorial staff members (Ricky Van Veen, Jake Hurwitz, Amir Blumenfeld, Dan Gurewitch, Patrick Cassels, Sarah Schneider, Streeter Seidell, Sam Reich and Jeff Rubin), who play fictionalized versions of themselves.

Books

The Writers of CollegeHumor.com (2006-04-06). The CollegeHumor Guide to College: Selling Kidneys for Beer Money, Sleeping with Your Professors, Majoring in Communications, and Other Really Good Ideas. Dutton Adult. ISBN 0525949399.
The Writers of CollegeHumor.com (2007-03-27). Faking It: How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself. Dutton Adult. ISBN 0525949917.