Comedy news: Interview: SSP meets Hoot Comedy's James Rawlings and Ben Bond

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When you think of online comedy videos the name that most people are naturally drawn to is Will Ferrell’s American site Funny or Die. Now, the UK has its very own competitor in the internet funnies field with Hoot Comedy. Jesse Whittock met its founders to get the low-down.

“In the beginning it was kind of Marxist, you know, the means of production are now in the hands of the people,” says Ben Bond, creative director and co-founder of the world’s newest comedy video web portal Hoot Comedy. “You’re banging your Marxist drum again,” his partner James Rawlings reminds him. “I have been banging my Marxist drum a lot lately. Well, we are the Marxist parasites on the bum of international comedy,” says Bond.

Socialist spirit is what Hoot is all about, a bit like a big online comedy street party of comic performers and writers. With talent such as double Perrier award-winners Laura Solon and Bill Willbond part of its slate, the site aims to act as a “boutique shop window” for unappreciated acts to get their material out there. Such Small Portions met Bond, a Bafta-nominated writer, and Rawlings, a 2002 Perrier award-winner himself with his troupe The Consultants, at the Glasshouse Stores pub in Soho for a chat and a beer.

SSP: So, how are you guys?

James Rawlings: Well, we’ve both got young children – Ben’s just had a baby and I’ve got a couple a bit older than that – so it’s the first time we’ve been at the pub at six in the evening for ages. So good, thanks.

SSP: It’s well deserved by the sounds of it, and congratulations to Ben. Tell us about Hoot.

JR: It began as an idea 18 months ago and we launched in January; it’s me and Ben writing and producing – with me occasionally putting my performance hat on. We’ve got a talent pool of writers, professional comics and producers. It’s essentially an online boutique shop window for all of those performers that we love who are stuck in development hell, or have material which they haven’t been able to get out there any other way.

Ben Bond: We provide them a different approach to the development process – you can experiment and visualise what you’re doing. It might be at the early stage of development, but we’re delivering things directly to comedy aficionados as the comics intended. All comedy is a gamble, but if you’ve got great people at the base of it and you trust their writing and performing, you can’t go far wrong.

SSP: So what can we expect from Hoot?

BB: We’re focusing on just a few strands at a time, so we can really focus on helping them. There’s a really interesting show from Laura (Solon) and Bill (Willbond) called Peter and Alison, about a couple who’re struggling under the strain of the recession. There’re loads of artists signed up on the site. (Eds note: this includes TV funny girl Emma Fryer, Rawlings’ director brother Rob, Britain’s poshest comic Will Smith and Thick of It actor Alex Macqueen.)

SSP: What’s the gameplan, productions wise?

BB: James has just designed a fucking brilliant online satire called Internews.

JR: It’s a very warm show from a brilliant animator called Jim le Fevre –and it’s very Michel Gondry, like Anchorman meets the Muppets. It’s about two disgraced anchor men who’ve set up their own broadcast channel, and all they’ve got is a studio and a few mates. They never leave the studio and the kicker is they get all of their information from the internet: it’s all bollocks.

SSP: Like Wayne’s World for the online generation.

BB: Very much so but the animation is just so wonderful. It’s really, really funny; simple but brilliant. I’m very excited about it.

The two anchors are Rick Chudzynski, a dumb American dude who got fired from Fox – he’s a bit like the Buzz Lightyear of news; and Thomas Pelham, who is straight out of a Graeme Green novel; he gets very turned on talking about Alan Greenspan. Having the two together allows you to have some real dumbness – possibly at the expense of our friends across the Pond.

SSP: What are the main hurdles for you this year?

JR: I think they’re fucking everywhere!

BB: We’re in a massive fucking internet steeplechase. Comedy is a tough, polarised business – the industry and audience are tough. People don’t like upstarts coming in, thats why we’re launching small.

SSP: Your main competitor appears to be Funny or Die (Will Ferell’s U.S. site which is fronted by David Walliams and Matt Lucas in the UK) – as other portals like Comedy Demon have gone under. How do you feel about that?

JR: We feel like we lucked out. We were just trying to get something together and see what happened and here we are a year later being talked about as the only other people in Funny or Die’s market; that’s great. But, then again, like anything in comedy, people love to see you die on your arse. That’s half the joy of it, it can go either way.

SSP: Speaking of dying on your arse, what’s the worst that’s ever happened to you on stage, James?

JR: It was at the Dorchester, for something like Cisco Systems, it was about 100 round tables of 10 people. We turned up and Bill Bailey was going to do a gig. We saw him, spent about half an hour talking as he was setting up and then went out on stage. 

It was basically a lot of sales boys on a company night out who’d been drinking since six and had been promised great comedy. Then someone announces, “Ladies and gents, please welcome to the stage, The Consultants!”  Immediately they’re all like, ‘Who the fuck are The Consultants? Radio 4? Fuck off!’ I remember thinking, about 30 seconds in that the mics had been turned down... but no, the volume in the room had just gone up. I was very conscious that there was a guy just to my right who was standing on a chair screaming “FUUUUCK OOOOOFF!”

Bread rolls got thrown. We tried to speed up the act and just as we got to the end of the gig, I forgot my lines. I thought no-one was listening and just as I whispered to Neil (Edmond, a fellow Consultant) to let him know, there was silence and it boomed out. The bloke on the chair went mental. After we got off stage, we sneaked out through the kitchen. It was fucking awful.

SSP: And finally, what’s the best reply to a heckle you’ve ever seen?

JR: That was in Edinburgh. It was about two in the morning, people where chucking glasses and a Scottish dude in kilt with a beard came out. Someone shouted, “You’re a cunt!” He says, “Who said that? Who said that?”

He got off the stage, walked across people’s chairs to the guy and pulled out this massive roll of Gaffa tape from under his kilt. He just Gaffa-taped this bloke’s entire head, starting with his mouth. Then he got back on stage, put a spotlight on him and said, “Right, anyone else got anything to say?” 

If you want to know more about Hoot Comedy visit: www.hootcomedy.com