by Marlon Wayans is hoping the acronym WTF won’t be so NSFW when he’s done with his new online project, which boasts, “We’re dropping the ‘F’ word.”
Called WhatTheFunny.com, the site remains a placeholder for now, awaiting enough short videos and/or webseries from Wayans and his funny friends to launch later this year or early in 2014. If any of that or the title evokes the spirit of Funny or Die, that’s intentional. Wayans is building What The Funny with Randy Adams, a co-founder and former director at FoD, who described the new venture to The Hollywood Reporter thusly: “If Funny or Die is the Saturday Night Live of the web, what we’re trying to do is the In Living Color of the web.”
Wayans was on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday night to promote his role in the new movie, The Heat, but his own brand of WTF didn’t come up in that conversation.
At a time when the trendy move for comedy video operations is to launch straight to YouTube, What The Funny seems like a retro idea, circa 2007-2008, when College Humor, My Damn Channel or Funny or Die were establishing themselves as alternate destinations for online humor. When FoD tried itself to create spinoff sites, those failed to gain much traction. One such site, BlueCollarOrDie.com (as in comedy specific to the fans of the “Blue Collar” tour stand-ups), changed its name to Kung Fu Todd before FoD shut it down in 2008. There’s still a BlueCollarOrDie YouTube page, if you’re interested.
Wayans and Adams are seeking investors and comedians to join them in WhatTheFunny.com.
