/Interview/ The brains behind: Wonderglen
26/05/2009 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Wonderglen, an intranet for a fake TV production company, turned out to be the creation of former Daily Show producer Ben Karlin. Here he tells us all about it
.net: What is Wonderglen all about?
BK: Wonderglen is a humble attempt to redefine humour as we know on the world wide web and quite possibly in the world as we know it.
.net: How did you come up with the idea for it?
BK: A couple of years ago, I started a new production company for HBO. I thought I would set up an intranet site, so they could see what I was working on for them. Then I thought: why not make the intranet site the thing I worked on for them? I’m lazy that way.
.net: When the site was launched, it created a lot of buzz, in particular speculating about the identity of its creators. Why did you decide to remain anonymous for several months?
BK: Shame, mainly. After that, it was just about being curious to observe how people respond to something absent of the usual signifiers. In one sense, we wanted to see if it could go viral without any artificial stimulation. In another sense, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
.net: How many people are behind the site? Who are the writers?
BK: For a long time, there were just one or two other people working on the site here in our offices. Then we added a couple of people when we started making more videos. We also had the designers, who are a husband and wife combo. So, at one point we might have been able to field a full basketball team, but sadly, we wouldn’t have had enough players to conduct a full court scrimmage against ourselves. So when it came time to play another humour website in the Comedy Nerd Olympics, we would have been crushed. Almost all the writing was done by the brilliant San Francisco comedy troupe known as Kasper Hauser.
.net: You seem to have seeded several fake sites like drdeanpayne.com and video clips all over the web. How did you assemble the crew (actors, directors, etc)?
BK: Mostly through friends or people we’d worked with before. People want to work, especially if they are going to be doing something funny. Between New York and LA there are far more talented people than there is work – so we always had an abundance of resources available. Except for the time we were looking for a hobbit. Then we only found one guy.
.net: Who’s responsible for the web design and the technical implementation of the Wonderglen site and its viral outreach?
BK: The design and technical stuff was handled by Interval Studios. They’re a very talented small company that I became aware of through some friends. As for the viral outreach, well, we had somewhat of a haphazard approach there. A lot of it was done the old-fashioned way through sending the link to people we knew who we thought would like the site. A few people championed it early on.
.net: Your background is in TV. How difficult was it to create comedy for the web?
BK: Before I worked in TV, I had a lot of experience in the print world and I worked at The Onion at the time it launched online. Creating the content was never really that difficult. Figuring out the right people to be talking to about the technical end of things, and the nuances of online distribution – that was way murkier than I could have ever anticipated. I have this unbelievably naïve mentality that says if you make something good, the audience will find it no matter what.
.net: What was the initial feedback like? Were people really fooled by it?
BK: I’m not sure people were fooled. Perhaps confused. Some were elated. Others tickled. Three people thought it was manna from heaven. One guy said, “Ehh”. Overall the feedback was positive.
.net: I understand that Wonderglen wasn’t intended as a piece of self-promotion for your company Superego or a larger project you’re working on. What did you want to achieve with it?
BK: We’ve been asking ourselves that question for some time. More than anything we see the web as a place that is extremely friendly to experimentation. People experiment with their lifestyles. They experiment with medication that would be otherwise unavailable to them. They experiment with made-up identities that allow them to engage with people who would normally find them creepy. We just wanted to make a comedy site that felt like a pure web creation. Something that only made sense on the web, not just because of the ease of distribution, but because of the very nature of the comedy itself.
.net: How did you fund Wonderglen? You’re not making any money with it, are you?
BK: Are you familiar with the Macarthur Genius Grant? It’s a large, no strings attached grant given annually to a handful of the world’s best and brightest minds. In 2007, I robbed one of the winners of his prize money: Sven Haakanson, an anthropologist/preservationist who was reviving and giving contemporary meaning to indigenous languages, customs and culture in an isolated region of North America.
.net: Is this it, or have you got more plans for Wonderglen?
BK: Oh, we’ve got more plans for Wonderglen. By the time we’re done, Wonderglen will be the RC Cola of the internet. And no, I don’t know what that means.
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