Comedy 23/6

» see 236.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

23/6 launched on 9 November 2007 as a joint venture between the Huffington Post and Barry Diller's IAC, incorporated as Comedy News Ventures. The name carried the joke: an hour and a day short of 24/7. The line under the logo read "Some of the News, Most of the Time", and the site's own description called it a topical humor site delivering breaking news and satire all day.

The staffing was serious money. Michael Jackson, formerly of the BBC and Channel 4, was the executive in charge of production. Arianna Huffington published it. Ben Wikler edited it first, then Jason Reich, who had written for The Daily Show, took the chair. Sarah Bernard, a former Huffington Post general manager, was president. Bill Maher and Tracey Ullman wrote for the blog. Brian Spinks ran video with New York comedians who were mostly not famous yet, among them John Mulaney, Jenny Slate, H. Jon Benjamin and Eugene Mirman.

The plan, as Arianna Huffington put it in her launch post, was a two-site habit. You would come to the Huffington Post to find out what had happened in the world, then go to 23/6 to see it turned inside out. That depended on the first site handing its readers to the second one every single day.

I was 23 and in Ankara when this launched, which is the wrong place for it in a way that has nothing to do with language. The jokes needed the previous twelve hours of American cable news already loaded in your head. The Daily Show reached Turkey as clips, passed around weeks late, separated from the news week they were built out of. A site whose entire value was same-day timing had nothing to offer anyone outside the timezone that produced it.

~ the case file ~

~ the room ~

The group blog was called The Room, and its contributor list is most of why anyone who worked in comedy then still remembers the site. Paula Poundstone, Greg Fitzsimmons, Mike Birbiglia and Taylor Negron posted there. Todd Barry, Joe Mande, Julie Klausner, Jon Glaser, David Rees and Larry Murphy turned up in the video work. A decent number of them went on to shows that outlived 23/6 by a decade or more.

The format was completely ordinary for 2008, which is part of the story. A post with the joke already in the headline, and a short video shot cheaply somewhere in New York. What 23/6 never built was a way to move any of that past the people who were already reading the Huffington Post.

~ february 2009 ~

IAC pulled its support at the end of 2008. In February 2009 the Huffington Post took the site over, and the version a source gave AdWeek was blunt: HuffPost "was able to snatch up the remains of 23/6 for next to nothing, as IAC had planned to shut the site down completely." IAC disputed the framing in public, saying 23/6 had been "absolutely a partnership from the start" and that it would be keeping a small stake in the venture.

The shape of what followed is not in dispute. Several assets of 236.com were repurposed to fill a comedy channel on huffingtonpost.com. The offices closed. The headcount went from a working newsroom to three staffers, with freelance work promised to the people who had just been laid off. Sarah Bernard, the president, did not stay.

~ where the brand went ~

The archive dates the handover more precisely than the press did. 236.com served a full 22KB site on 6 January 2009 and never served another one. The next capture of that address, on 18 March 2009, is a 301 redirect to huffingtonpost.com/comedy. Somewhere in those ten weeks the standalone site stopped existing and the brand became a section heading on somebody else's homepage.

HuffPost Comedy is a live URL to this day, which is the reason Wikipedia's infobox for a site that died in 2009 still links to a page that loads. 236.com has been through squatters and parking pages for seventeen years and currently answers with a redirect script instead of a page.

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