I am trying to get my first joke on air. I think it’s not too bad. It’s based on a woman driving across Europe to find relatives and discovering that one of them is Gene Wilder, son of Gene Wild and father of Gene Wildest. Do you see what I did? Wild, Wilder and Wildest. Yes, I know. Take a minute to catch your breath, then read on.

At the time of writing, my competition is fierce. AlisonW is offering existential slapstick based on a misunderstanding about a Scandinavian town called Hell: one of the relatives is in Hell, which the woman thinks means they’re dead. Dave Saunders has a fully structured script about linguistic misunderstanding over the word “sperm”, and Amanda Kate is suggesting a luminous globe, so the woman’s irritating brother can check their route at night.

This is no ferocious Hollywood scriptwriter’s meeting. Nobody is dissing my ideas or trying to bitch-slap me when I crack a funny. There aren’t any doughnuts. This is, instead, just a slightly confusing web page and me. The sitcom I’m pitching my gag to is called Where Are the Joneses, and it’s only available online.

Using the same technology as Wikipedia, it essentially allows anyone and everyone to offer up material and ideas, write and edit each other’s scripts or even audition for a role. The plot is really just a premise: Dawn Jones discovers that her father was an extremely active sperm donor who fathered 26 children across the Continent, and sets out to find them all. Hilarity ensues.

Joneses is the creation of Steve Coogan and Henry Normal’s production company, Baby Cow, though the initial idea came from Ford. The car giant has been doling out machines to a variety of travelling creative types – including the fledgling singer-songwriter Ben Griffith, who appears with his Ford Focus Zetec Climate in much of the company’s newspaper advertising this year – thus helping them to tour or, in Baby Cow’s case, create a sitcom with travelling at the plot’s core. Of course, Dawn rides in a Ford, but, says Normal, that is the limit of Ford’s creative involvement.

“We’ve run the whole project as we would any other,” he explains. “We take ideas from the website up until 6pm, then filter them through our editors. Obviously, the internet is unregulated, but we don’t want to be putting stuff up there that would cause legal problems or certain kinds of offence. Then we hand the ideas to the production team in the field and they film them the following day. It’s got a little bit of Whose Line Is It Anyway? about it, because they tend to have to improvise around the idea rather than use specific scripts, but as each episode is roughly five minutes, that is not a problem – the cast are strong improvisers.”

Joneses has its own site, on which writing and auditioning takes place – so far, one person in Amsterdam and one in France have made it into the show – but each episode is immediately uploaded to YouTube, the content site famous for short-form dramas such as LonelyGirl15 and homemade skits such as Ask a Ninja. So far, the YouTube response has not been overwhelming. The most popular episode has been watched 2,713 times in its month online, with the second-and third-placed webisodes earning 1,469 and 867 views respectively. The emo band Fall Out Boy discussing sniffing panties on a music upload called No Good Television, on the other hand, attracted 700,000 views in 24 hours.

“I think it’s reasonably enjoyable,” says Steve Bennett, editor and owner of Chortle, the UK’s biggest comedy website. “The problem is, the chunks of footage are too short to allow for character development or proper narrative arcs, so you’re not gripped and don’t look in daily – which is surely the point. The wiki technology is also pretty hard to navigate, so you have to be dedicated to make it work. At least it has some quality control, because most comedy online is pretty poor – apart from the illegal rip-offs of broadcast comedy.”

As Bennett points out, online comedy is struggling to find its voice. While music and film – albeit usually pirated – are comfortably ensconced on websites, blogs and download sites, comedy performances have so far been confined to snatched video of live gigs (with a clip of the stand-up Jim Jeffries being attacked on stage proving the most popular by a long way), You’ve Been Framed-style clips and the occasional sketch attempt. The main problem is the absence of an editor – the strength for other forms.

The web’s freedom means that political opinions can lay siege to totalitarian firewalls, and music can prosper because so much of it belongs to genres. It is, of course, crude to say that indie kids think the same, dress the same and like the same stuff (though, if you wandered through Camden market, you’d be forgiven for thinking just that). All the same, if you’re listening to Last.fm, like a track marked “indie” and cruise through other indie offerings, you stand a reasonable chance of discovering something you’ll like.

Not so with comedy. You could loosely group together early silent movies under slapstick. But would you call Basil Fawlty slapstick? He slaps Manuel. He beats a car with a stick. But if you worship at the altar of Charlie Chaplin, you’re unlikely to enjoy Fawlty Towers – in part because you’re probably French. There is nobody to guide you apart from existing broadcasters, which means the comedy that works is basically the exact same stuff you get on TV.

For the industry, however, the net has become a valuable tool. The stand-up Dan Clark has had a sitcom commissioned by the BBC, and is in talks in America, thanks to skits he posted on the Paramount Comedy site. Peter Serafinowicz, from Spaced, boosted his profile with mock interviews at the Oscars and on the Apple/Beatles court settlement. Even Hollywood’s own Will Ferrell has put routines involving a drunken landlady, played by his three-year-old daughter, demanding rent from him on his site, Funny or Die.

Normal hopes that by the end of the 86 episodes of Joneses, he will have found a couple of decent scriptwriters, although, almost halfway through the project, he has not hit on anyone yet. Inspired by his ambition to discover the next Larry Sanders, I return to the fiendishly complicated wiki site and try to get my gag posted for Tuesday’s episode. First the page won’t work properly with my browser, so I have to download another. This takes ages, so, when I’m finally ready to post, the 6pm deadline has passed. I’m too late. And that’s the problem with writing good comedy. It’s all about timing.

wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com

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