FOS Terry Reilly hipped us to a short piece in the Wall Street Journal, by Julia Angwin, on the WWW’s newest humor site:

The Project: Former AOL marketing executive Charlie Warner has put about $500,000 into the launch of DailyComedy.com, a Web site with a staff of 14 professional comedians that will post fresh material throughout each day. Mr. Warner says “this is for people who want stuff that is more dependable,” than the scatalogical humor on sites like CollegeHumor.com and the more traditional comedians on Comedy Central. “This is America’s funniest comedians, fresh every day,” Mr. Warner says.

The Outlook: DailyComedy is entering a crowded category. Big sites like News Corp.’s MySpace.com and Time Warner’s AOL have pumped up their comedy offerings, and lots of home-grown joke sites attract loyal followings. Still, Mr. Warner has a chance to attract advertisers with the promise of a site that’s safe and clean and slightly more highbrow than the college joke properties.

“Safe and clean and slightly more highbrow,” is the angle that Warner is working here. At least according to Angwin, but that was probably scraped directly from the press release. Not much of an angle, considering how many joke sites clog the WWW… and how many jokes circulate virally. The angle is especially puzzling, since, in the DailyComedy’s Terms of Service, is this: “Please be aware that Daily Comedy.com often contains adult content or content that some may find offensive”

When all is said and done, is this site not wildly redundant? And not just a little behind the curve?

Still, we’re pleased to see some real, live comics picking up a paycheck or two or three for writing comedy. (Nice to see that Warner didn’t just go shopping at Harvard for a bunch of 20-something irony-mongers.) But that might be the only positive thing we can say about the venture.

There are some features of the site that are jarring– The first thing that caught our eye was a Flash animation of CEO Warner being hit in the face with a pie by writer Ray Ellin. The little Flash playlet eventually yields to the tagline, “DailyComedy.com, where the comics are in charge.” We suppose that the pie was fresh, (in keeping with Warner’s boast), but the cream pie image/icon should be shelved permanently (along with the Rubber Chicken, the Nose and Glasses thing and the Hurling of the Rotten Tomato). Those icons haven’t been a part of the American zeitgeist in at least fifty years. (We apologize for using the term zeitgeist, but we’re fairly certain that we actually used it correctly in this instance!)

Also somewhat off-putting is the fact that readers are invited to “Add a riff or rebuttal, or share an idea” to each comic’s bit and that “our comedians take requests.” Oh? They do? Yipe.

Readers also have an option to automatically email individual bits to a friend.

And readers are invited to rate each bit. (Rate it from zero to five stars.) We suppose this is harmless enough… and may even prove to be beneficial to the writers in the long run. After all, the worst thing about humor-writing grind (either for the internet or for radio), is the utter lack of feedback. (Or, the utter lack of positive feedback, as it seems that negativity is the only thing that seems to spur folks to write.) The star system seems to be window dressing, though– can’t the webmaster simply note the number of times a reader has been moved to email the bit to a friend enough of a measure of a bit’s popularity?

Another feature invites readers to “create a comedy stage.” (We suspect that it’s a sign of Warner’s incessant preaching of the gospel of internet interactivity during his sting as, “a Vice President in AOL’s Interactive Marketing division.”

But he left that position in 2002. Four years ago… an eternity in WWW years. A whole lot of ideas have emerged, burned brightly and briefly, then died horrible deaths, taking fortunes and dreams, both large and small, down with them. This site sounds like an idea left over from the dotcom bubble.

Near as we can tell, Warner is mainly a radio guy who then retreated into academia before ending up at AOL in the late 90s. This is his comeback.

The WSJ spilt some precious ink on DailyComedy.com, so it automatically has a headstart on the next few humor sites that launch. And we suspect that in addition to the half-million bucks that Warner has budgeted, he’s also calling in all his favors from his stint as an AOL suit– so he’s got a lot riding on it and he fully expects it to succeed.

So we have an irresistible urge to handicap the race, so to speak. Our early prediction: Early excitement among some folks not in the laughs biz, followed by utter and total rejection among those who actually make a living writing and performing, eventually limping to a slow and ignominous death.

Comics won’t dig it. (It’s billed as a “virtual comedy club,” which will make any real comic wince.) And the general tone of the site is… off somehow. The pie in the face was merely our first indication that something was amiss. The staff writers were forced to pose with zany props (a baseball bat, stuffed animals, puppets, the old arrow-through-the-head) for their official pics and Warner appears at one point wearing a dunce cap. (!)

And, here’s Rule #4 of their “Get Discovered” contest:

The bits should work off this setup: “Two guys walk into a bar…” Run with it, be creative, have a blast … but remember: “creative” doesn’t have to mean filthy. In this case, it can’t: Advertisers don’t like filthy. So just be funny.

Huh? And prospective entrants are told, “If you win, you’ll get discovered—- and the world will know that you’re a real comedian!” Huh? Wha?!

Warner is a radio guy who hid out in Academe for a while (Leonard Goldenson Endowed Professor, University of Missouri School of Journalism) before landing a gig at AOL, where, near as we can tell, he was supposed to crack the whip and get radio stations to heel to AOL and supply them with their content. Apparently, that plan backfired miserably.

Cheapshot Alert: Here’s a sentence from one of Warner’s posts on his blog, where he calls himself the Media Curmudgeon:

The Media Curmudgeon, along with the majority of the Wall Street community, thought Microsoft was the most logical buyer of a big piece of AOL from Time Warner because we felt Microsoft needed AOL more than anyone else did in order to make its late-to-market search product competitive with Google’s, which has a huge lead, to some degree because of the huge traffic it gets from AOL.

That’s 69 words… in one sentence… if we counted right. And this guy was a prof at a school that is often cited as one of the top three J-schools in the country. That sentence would get you a D, even if you were attending Temple‘s J-school.