www.funnyordie.com

Comedy veteran Will Ferrell has entered into the internet humor video website arena with funnyordie.com. Ferrell has teamed with Adam McKay to launch the website that will feature clips from well-known comedians and the site’s visitors side-by-side. Like so many other web-based comedy video websites, it will be user-supported with comments sections on each video clip’s page and a ranking system.

The flagship video on Funnyordie.com thus far seems to be one featuring Will Ferrell and Adam McKay themselves called The Landlord. The popular clip has Ferrell acting as a struggling tenant that can’t pay his rent and is thus berated by his infant, drunken landlord as a result.

While Funnyordie.com has an appealing premise, it will be no surprise that the initial attractiveness will come from Will Ferrell’s immense popularity as a television and film comedian. Ferrell was a mainstay on NBC’s Saturday Night Live for years while appearing in feature films as a supporting character early in his career. However, the past few years have been very kind to Ferrell, who has starred in his own blockbuster comedies such as "Old School" and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby."

It is apparent that Funnyordie.com is going to rely heavily on its user base for its inertia. In addition to relying on user-submitted video clips for a majority of its content, it features the ranking system that seems to be its main quirky feature. Films are voted on by users and are given a status icon based on the film’s perceived humor value. Top films are labeled as "Immortal" and the lowest ranking films are sent to "the Crypt," a place where internet humor videos are sent to die. In between those polar opposites are such titles as "Walking Tall," "Kinda Cute," and "Uh-oh."

The site doesn’t yet seem to allow videos to be imbedded or shared in any way like its established rival YouTube; such a feature can be the lifeblood of viral networking for such video sites. If they don’t decide to implement this feature, it could be a fatal mistake on their part.

Funnyordie.com is riding off the very large coattails of such internet video clip giants such as Youtube.com, Google Video, and Myspace Videos. It certainly isn’t the first video site to be launched that revolves solely around the humor niche either as its primary competition; Break.com and CollegeHumor.com have a very large user base already.