Viral Video Comedy Workshop
How can humor help your video message go viral? Clearly, laughter plays a role in promoting progressive values—on TV and on the web. Comedians and online activists from The Onion, 236.com and Comedy Central discuss what makes humor work online, showcase their examples of successful video and offer feedback on videos brought by attendees.
Most of the liberal community became familiar with comedian Lee Camp when he went live on Fox News and called them a "parade of propaganda and festival of ignorance." The clip went viral, garnering millions of views. Camp also writes humor and produces videos for the front page of the Huffington Post as well as contributing to The Onion newspaper. He’s also a prolific stand-up comic, having headlined over 500 colleges across the country and performing regularly with Laughing Liberally.
You might have seen Lee Camp on Comedy Central, PBS, SpikeTV, E! network, ABC’s “Good Morning America,” or Showtime’s “The Green Room.” He is also featured in the new bestselling book Satiristas! by Paul Provenza. George Carlin’s daughter Kelly recently had this to say: “Since my dad died, I’ve been concerned about who’s going to keep the torch alive, who’s going to keep it lit. And I saw Lee, and I was completely f*cking blown away by the balls he has. I thought ‘Hey, that’s like my dad.’ Three things about Lee really remind me of my father. One of which is that he’s a thinking person’s comic. Secondly, he may just piss you off a little. But the most important thing is that he’s really f*cking funny.”
Check out www.LeeCamp.net for more info, videos, and writing by Lee Camp.
Raised on the mean streets of New York City's Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) Katie is a national director of Living Liberally and a founder of and comedian in Laughing Liberally, a political comedy collective. She has performed comedy throughout the country at venues including Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project in New York, the D.C. Comedy Festival, Jimmy Tingles in Boston and at all three Netroots Nations (the Convention formerly known as Yearly Kos). Katie has performed with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her political satire appears regularly on the Huffington Post, Alternet, Daily Kos, Open Left, Working Life, Culture Kitchen and the political comedy site 23/6. Katie has been interviewed and featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Jezebel, Gawker, on Air America, The Sam Seder Show, The Mark Maron Show, Laura Flanders' GritTV, WBAI, Sirius Radio, XM Radio POTUS, and Fox News Channel's The Alan Colmes Show. The National Review (believe it or not) called Katie "cute" and "a little brainy." Katie's award-winning documentary about historical memory in Spain, La memoria es vaga, has been screened throughout Spain and the U.S. Katie was the co-producer of Tim Robbins and DCTV's Embedded Live, Associate Producer of Estela Bravo's Free to Fly: the U.S. Cuba Link, and outreach director of Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's documentary The Take (La toma). Katie is currently editing her next documentary, Another Camp Is Possible, about Camp Kinderland (where Katie went, and her mother and gandmother worked) and their "Peace Olympics," the camp's non-violent and socially conscious alternative to Color Wars.
