"This is actually funnier than any show on TBS. The site makes excellent use of the Web by allowing users to watch, play, create and send silliness. You can spend fifteen seconds or fifteen minutes and still leave smiling." —juror Lou Kinard
"Smart, witty and fun. It does a great job promoting TBS's programming and reinforcing the brand position. The copy is well written, the video production quality is high and the content is strong and viral." —juror Susan Easton
Overview: A deadpan attempt to dissect humor, this site invites users to examine everything from the theories behind prank phone calls to the study of a man being struck repeatedly by plastic balls. With its rich content and mock-documentary tone, Humor Analysis rarely lets down its guard, while consistently delivering plenty of laughs.
• Funny short films and movie maker
• Wallpaper generator
• PHP backend
• All features send-to-a-friend enabled
Comments by Big Spaceship:
"TBS's Dept. of Humor Analysis works hard to put the 'very' in front of 'funny.'
"To help TBS steer clear of common pitfalls in this cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, rabbit-outwit-duck, duck-shoot-pig, anvil-smush-coyote, Chico-trip-Zeppo field of funny business, Big Spaceship joined forces with the good folks at Mother to turn a very silly printed questionnaire into an addictive, fully-interactive site. In this clinically antiseptic, digital environment, vulnerable specimens such as cheap puns, sausages and paleontologists, undergo grueling and methodical prodding by an advisory board of blasé professionals—AKA site visitors.
"We assembled our own team to analyze, interpret, decipher, re-analyze and redact the printed survey into a combination of multiple choice and fully interactive questions. But the 40 or so questions in the survey were clearly too many for a Web audience. So we built a framework to intelligently serve this content, alternating between fully-interactive and copy-based questions, in more manageable chunks of five (a number based on our own limited attention spans).
"Next, in a creative collaboration with Mother, we moved on to some new, original features to be housed in the Humor Lab that allow users to create their own comedic content, such as future sitcoms, short films with flatulence-filled soundtracks, puns translated around the world, and the Mother-produced and aptly titled 'Funny Shorts.'
"Our art director on the project ran into the poor actor who got nailed with the ball (in the name of science, of course) at a local Borders in LA. He pretended not to know him."