The videos are both funny and self aware. One shows The Office-stars Ellie Kemper and BJ Novak giving an onscreen countdown till they ask for money while complimenting the viewer as being a good person for continuing to watch. It’s not just comedians standing in a studio however as a few feature the likes of Nick Kroll and Ed Helms travelling around Africa. The clips are funny as well though, as Kroll plays his Bobby Bottleservice character who helpfully explains that mosquitos carry malaria just like his ex-girlfriend carried gonorrhea. Obviously, it’s not all laughs, but there’s a high enough ratio to keep people watching watching more than their typical amount of PSAs.

From a press release:

“While the videos are funny and entertaining, Comedy Fights Malaria shows that the disease is no laughing matter – every 45 seconds, a child in Africa dies from malaria, but humor can keep malaria in the spotlight and in the conversation. Visit the links below for PSA’s featuring Orlando Bloom, John Mayer, Ted Danson, Jeremy Piven, Ellie Kemper, BJ Novak and Ed Helms among others and let me know if you would like further information on the campaign. Please feel free to embed the links on your site or link to us on Facebook.

Fans and supporters are asked to “Like” Malaria No More on Facebook www.Facebook.com/MalariaNoMore and learn about how the world is working to end malaria deaths in Africa by 2015 while also checking out exclusive content from the campaign and seeing how they can be a part of the victory against the disease.”

Comedy for a good cause is nothing new (see: Comic Relief in England and this Thursday’s Night of Too Many Stars on Comedy Central) but that doesn’t make the Comedy Fights Malaria campaign any less fun. Check out some of the videos below:

I IM’d the intrepid Mr. McCarthy and he explained all: Greer Barnes was on Comedy Central at 10, an old Mitch Hedberg special at 10:30 (the much-loved Hedberg died in 2005), “John Oliver and Friends” on at 11, opposite Mulaney on TBS. Fabrice Fabrice was one of the “Friends” on the Oliver special and Smacky is a Hedberg joke. “People must have stayed in because it’s so cold everywhere and watched comedy on TV!” said McCarthy (whose earlier tweet agonized over having to choose between Oliver and Mullaney). Based on Google Hot Trends, it sounds like he’s right; related searches included Eugene Mirman (who came after Oliver, along with helpful instructions about how to repel a bear attack) as well as for Greg Fitzsimmons.And also for Morgan Christie, who is apparently dating Jon Gosselin, but there is humor in that, surely.

Anyhow — far be it from us to just go through Google Trends to make a post! If you’re still searching, here’s some tidbits to enjoy.

Update: Now Aziz Ansari is trending.

Greer Barnes

Fabrice Fabrice
“No more carrot sticks for you, Robert Guillame!”

John Mulaney

Mitch Hedberg

But what I realized just now after clicking on a video from their newsletter is that they are the only platform — besides maybe YouPorn — where the actual platform is synonymous with the type of content you’ll find there. I’m not talking about channels on YouTube or Blip.tv or Kaltura, which are all certainly impressive — I’m talking about branding. Funny or Die is now the Kleenex of comedy videos — instant shorthand for what you’re getting. It’s like how for a while we all said “YouTube” even if we were referring to a video on, say, Vimeo (“Let’s Vimeo this!” never quite made it into the popular lexicon.)

Funny or Die means two things: (1) Videos and (2) Comedy. If I am missing any other video platform that achieves the same effect — other than YouPorn! — please let me know. This is impressive, though. Remember the question mark hanging over Funny or Die after launch? Would “The Landlord” be a flash in the pan, would people watch non-Will Ferrell videos, would power — and profits — shift into the hands of the artists?

Well, the last one is still up in the air (though trending), but Funny or Die is here to stay. The site does pretty kickass traffic, averaging approximately 3.5 million uniques per month (see it to the right, compared against Gawker). This because of the answer to number two: Would people watch non-Will Ferrell videos? Why, yes, yes they would. That’s because the non-Will Ferrell videos involve people like Jon Hamm and Natalie Portman and Lindsay Lohan and Mandy Moore Bradley Cooper and Rashida Jones and Will Arnett, which in turn buoy the less mainstream but up-and-coming comedy stalwarts like Rob Huebel and Jon Daly and Paul Scheer and Seth Morris. And, once you’ve got ‘em in there for the biggies, it’s just a click away to sample the lesser-known fare. It’s the great Internet Circle of Life.

Funny or Die works for the same reason HuffPo works: Great incentives to submit your content for free. For one, “name” people established in one area are usually eager for the chance to establish in another. This is why Alec Baldwin, actor, is happy to contribute to HuffPo for free in order to be Alec Baldwin, pundit; this is why Mandy Moore appears in what would once have been a brand-despoiling faux commercial for, er, Red Bull used intimately. (And this is why I fully expect to see Joey McIntyre picked up for some comedic role sometime soon.) Also, thanks to the low barriers to entry — both in time spent and meddling outside forces — it’s easy to get content up on both sites that is personal, in-the-moment and unconstrained by the approval of outsiders. It’s great promo — we all know that. Finally, it’s personally gratifying — whether by contributing to a cause you support, or just goofing off with your friends, it’s easy to see why a celeb would want to throw up a Funny or Die video.

This isn’t news — but it took a while to play out in real time, and prove that Funny or Die had a legitimate, lasting model (and, irony alert: The publication that wondered if the site would make it — in an article called “Will Ferrell and the End of Media as We Know It” — was… Portfolio, which died six months ago). Well it is — so much so that a video like the one below of Will Arnett and the guys from Human Giant can get a million-plus views — a million-plus — while flying totally under the radar of the mainstream press (check out Google: The Will Arnett/Human Giant ‘sex tape’ had no big-time mainstream push). Those are some serious community-based numbers. Incidentally, how I found it: By clicking on the above-mentioned newsletter which advertised an Anvil video — Anvil is a Canadian rock group that puts the “old” in “old-school metal,” and I’m a supporter, so of course I clicked — but from there, I saw “Will Arnett Human Giant Sex Tape” and the next three minutes of my life were a foregone conclusion.

Was this all an elaborate excuse to post a Canadian band and a totally NSFW vid starring Will Arnett — who also happens to be Canadian? You’ll never know, but at least you can be confident that Funny or Die is here to stay. Now watch these videos, they’re funny.

Related, From The Past:
Will Ferrell and the End of Media as We Know It [Portfolio]

• Whether or not these are the five funniest tweets or just easiest to put on film is for you to decide – the point is, this is yet another example of book-publishing viral content, the new drop-dead necessity of the industry unless you’re Dan Brown and you sell a million copies on your first day. Instead of goofy YouTube videos, he gets movies starring Tom Hanks. But for the rest of us – including bestselling authors like A.J. Jacobs (viral vid here) or Emmy-winning comedy writers like David Javerbaum (viral vid here) — there now exists the ironclad imperative to whip up secondary content in the hopes of going viral, or even viral-ish.

So! The Five People You Tweet In Heaven? The Twitter Wit version is probably gonna be very different from the David Pogue version, but here they are:

• michaelianblack: “When people pick their “5 people living or dead to have dinner with,” don’t they worry they’ll be the most boring person at the meal?”
• azizansari: “Made it rain at the club last night. Thought people grab all the money and give it back so you can throw it again. Not how it works I guess.”
• pagecrusher: “Why aren’t martini glasses shaped so that they don’t spill so easily on the bus?”
• fireland: “Why should I be the one to take the kids to see their psychologist? I don’t even love them!”
• thepeoplegeek: “Cranked the treadmill up to MAX for 15 minutes. When I finally took a break my roller skates were hot to the touch.”

(For the record, I think my entry in the book is pretty funny… funny because it’s true.)

So! What do we learn from this? That endless content is to be had from breaking out lists from larger collections (“The Five Best Lists of Lists From The Past Five Years of Lists!”). That having a Twitter-based contest without a Twitter address anywhere on the page – or a hashtag, for that matter – is pretty ironic.  That creating interactive online content is an essential tool of good marketing.

To that end, I invite you to leave in the comments your own list of The Five People You Tweet In Heaven, because I’m a little meh on this list. Pretty sure we can do better. Also, I would like to create some viral content that I can then break out into separate lists for yet more viral content. And also because I really, really wanted to use the headling “The Five People You Tweet In Heaven,” because amazingly, no one seems to have used it yet. FIRST!

That’s all. Your call for the funniest peeps on Twitter  in the comments below, please. Or you can write, shoot, edit and upload a YouTube video, but that probably means you have a little too much time on your hands.

MySpace apparently didn’t pay for the spot (which TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington thinks is a good idea; I’m not sure, I’d look to danah boyd on that score). There was definitely some quid pro quo, though, between Anderson’s cameo and marketing the movie (see the movie page here and this walk-on contest for a lucky MySpacer here) . But though this was the most egregious placement, it was far from the only product I noticed in the movie.

I’m not sure if Judd Apatow struck any deals with Red Bull or for that frosty can of Diet Coke placed prominently in the big dinner scene, or for the Wilson tennis racket or the Nike shirt or the Mac computer(s), though by now that’s de rigeur (getting people to use PCs prominently in movies, now that would be a product placement coup!). But it was hard to miss the other product placements  — call it “These Are A Few of Judd Apatow’s Favorite Things.”

1. UCB Theater – For a movie like this, ironic t-shirts make up about 80% of wardrobe. Still, the ones you notice are no accident. Early on in the show Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright (né Weiner, pronounced “Wine-er”) is seen wearing the classic UCB logo t-shirt, staple of many who pass through its classes in NY and LA. Homegrown UCB alumni in the cast include Aziz Ansari and Aubrey Plaza; Apatow held a comedy night at UCB’s LA theater for his players to rehearse their stand-up chops. In the Venn Diagram of comedy these days, everyone’s got overlap with UCB.

2. Jews - Apatow’s one, Rogen’s one, Sandler’s one, Schwartzmann’s one, Hill’s one, etc. etc. We already knew Apatow liked Jews, but here he prods, just a little bit, into how Jewish identity can be complicated in show business. See above re: Ira Wright — says Sandler upon hearing Ira’s last name, in that lunchlady voice: “You’re hiding some Judaism!” Note, in the meantime, that Rogen’s character has already worn a SuperJew t-shirt; also note that Sandler’s character is named George Simmons. Hiding some Judaism? That’s never explored. Yet later, we get to see the perfect shiksa wife that got away. Watching the family scenes later, I couldln’t help but notice that Apatow had replaced his Jewy self at the head of the family with the less, er, ethnic-looking Eric Bana. That must have been weird. Those issues are all very much subtext in the film (perhaps there only to be overthought by Jews in the audience). But still. Noted.

3. Elizabeth Banks -She’s not in the credits, but she is in the movie — twice, as herself: She’s the “co-star” on not one but two movie posters starring Sandler’s alter-ego Simmons, Mer-Man and some other one you see early on as Simmons looks lugubriously through all his clippings. Apatow worked with Banks in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Rogen worked with her on Zack & Miri Make A Porno; they’re all buds, yada yada. Sort of an interesting choice to pair with George Simmons, on the verisimilitude front — if he’s really such a big star, then I’d have taken Eric Bana’s advice and gone with someone like Cameron Diaz. Banks is still getting there. But hey, I noticed — a little product placement can go a long way. For a friend.

4. Wilco - Duh. Judd Apatow is a Wilco fan. There’s also a Wilco t-shirt and a Wilco pun. (Here is a secret about puns: people say they  hate them but they usually always laugh, and they did in this movie.)

5. Jon Brion – Maybe I should just have called this post “indie bait.” Jon Brion is not a household name but he is to those who know about him. That includes Sandler (Brion scored Punch Drunk Love), and Apatow (Brion scored the Apatow-produced Step Brothers, which sounds like a punchline but isn’t), plus any L.A. scenester who frequents music club Largo (see above re: that Venn diagram). Brion produced two tracks on the Funny People soundtrack; that’s him rocking out with Sandler as a studio-musician-for-hire in yet another lugubrious scene about how Adam Sandler’s character has no real friends. Except for…

6. Comedians – Good God there were a lot of cameos in this movie. It felt at times like watching a Comedy Central Roast. Since excess running time has been an issue in reviews for the film, I’m just going to go ahead and say that Andy Dick could have been cut. (I know the movie relied heavily on dick jokes, but that one’s hardly inspired.) And I love me some Sarah Silverman, but vagina mouth we’ve seen, so why repeat the gag? I understand that we’re supposed to really believe that George is a big-time comic, but the big house convinced me; seeing Paul Reiser looking so old a decade after flying high on his own bumbling Jewish guy schtick was just depressing. (Though maybe that was Apatow’s point.) Either way, the price tag for Big-Name Comedian product placement didn’t help with the budget — according to Nikki Finke, Funny People cost between $70 – 100 million to make, which her commenters point out is far beyond what an ensemble drama like that should have cost (estimates were reportedly low $20 – mid $30 million). As Eric Buckman of Reel Loop says, “That’s what happens when you have Paul Reiser stop by for a cameo. The payroll goes through the roof.” Eminem can stay though.

7. His Family – Yes, I know I am not the first person to point this out. And I actually quite like Leslie Mann. And the kids are definitely cute. But I do agree that they could have been on the screen half as much and it would have been fine (the fight scene at the end could have been cut, playful dress-up moments could have been cut, dog licking peanut butter off their faces without any punchline could have been cut. If a dog’s gonna be licking peanut butter off someone’s something in an Apatow comedy, I expect better). Also, as an inveterate musical theater hack myself, I submit that the “Memory” clip could have been cut in half, too. And also not used as a completely transparent, and out of character hook. Adam Sandler didn’t give a shit about his cellphone once during the movie, why now? And while it was a nice rendition, what straight man has ever been moved by Grizabella?

8. His Friends – See above re: the movie’s price tag, but when you’re Judd Apatow and your friends all happen to be hilarious comedians, and your friends’ friends all happen to be hilarious comedians and everyone knows everyone because they were all on a UCB Harold team together or in a Funny or Die video together or at an SNL afterparty together — well, why not work with them? As many of them as possible? Apatow said as much himself on his MTV guest blog:

I must write more movies so I can spend time with friends.
Do people hang out who don’t work together?

Some do. But they’re not as funny. Or, I guess, rich. See you all on MySpace!

Related:
The most perceptive thing I read about Funny People: Is the Judd Apatow moment over? [Salon]
Great background: Judd Apatow’s Family Values [NYT]
Pretty Genius Viral Marketing: Cute Cuddly Kittens & Yo, Teach [YouTube]

Product Placement:
Funny People Theatrical Trailer [MySpace]
Funny People Restricted Trailer [FunnyPeopleMovie.com]