This week we flew up to Toronto to test out a new kind of Comedy Hack Day. CMDC had us build and demo two Comedy Hack Day-style projects at their conference. We brought six Comedy Hack Day all-stars (Zoe, Toby, Matt, Derek, Kim, and Aliya) and made two projects: Tab Champ and …
Last week we published our first Comedy Hack Day product video. It looks like this: We’re thrilled that people like it. We had a blast making the thing and would’ve been happy with 5k plays so all of this is gravy, honestly. However, because we did get a bunch of …
You know those startup videos? The ones that explain a product as you see people laughing in parks and b-roll of the Golden Gate Bridge? We made one for the most recent Comedy Hack Day winner–WellDeserved, the premier marketplace for unused privilege. We had a ton of fun creating this …
San Francisco, CA (October 8, 2014) – Cultivated Wit, a company that produces events and content worth hyperlinking in a lede, issued a press release today announcing that CEO and Co-Founder Baratunde Thurston will be embedded within Participant Media’s TV network, Pivot, as a co-host on TakePart Live. Thurston joins …
In December 2006, virtual real-estate mogul and real-life millionaire Anshe Chung conducted an interview with CNET inside the virtual walls of a Second Life studio. But not long into the interview, something not-so surprising happened. The conversation was hijacked by a bombardment of flying penises. Pictures and video went viral …
Let’s stop speculating about the future of online journalism for 20 minutes, and instead just enjoy the present of online journalism. Specifically, one of the more creative, fun, and masterfully executed videos you’ll ever find under the banner of “news.” Last week The Verge released a profile of eBoy, a …
One of my last acts as Director of Digital at The Onion was to help sell our channel to YouTube in Spring 2012 when it was launching its first major investment in original content. What The Onion ended up producing (for which I can take no credit) is some of …
While we love comedy and bake it into nearly every part of our day-to-day lives, it’s not the perfect tool for every job. As much as our brains may find humor in nearly everything, sometimes life calls for regular human behavior like showing sympathy, respect, or just ordering a sandwich …
We’ve always been a company of overlapping skills and interests. “And” was part of our founding. Comedy and technology. Agency and content and events and products. New York and San Francisco. Burritos and bicycles. Today we announce another affirmative and: the merger of Cultivated Wit and I Shot Him. See …
Here begins a new chapter in my life. And as new chapters go, this one is going to be an amazing, sexy, joke-filled jumble. Adam Peterson and I are merging our design studio, I Shot Him, with the fine gentlemen at Cultivated Wit. From the moment we met these comedy-spouting dweebs, …
We think Comedy Hack Day is awesome and at least a handful of other people do too. They are all in this video, captured in their post-CHD high. Feel free to enjoy this among family, friends, and past college roommates you sometimes hang out with in an attempt to hold …
Back in September 2012, I tweeted about Apple’s third-time rejection of Drones+, an iOS app that displayed reports of killings by U.S.-operated unmanned aerial vehicles. The app’s creator, Josh Begley, emailed to thank me for the tweet, and thus began an occasional electronic messaging relationship about data, hackathons, and robot …
This installment of ANWCEWSI features another from Key & Peele. I promise I’ve seen more than one show but “Continental Breakfast” came to mind after posting “Liam Neesons & Bruce Willy” so it’s 2/483,782. Be sure to watch through the end for one of the best-executed movie references ever.
What happens after we succumb to the marketing promises of a technology service only to find that eventually they stop supporting the product or shut it down altogether? Do technology companies—or users themselves—consider the full value users bring to the table? Why do I, a dark-skinned man, insist on recording video with …
After learning last night that a person whom I respect and will go nameless had not seen (any) Monty Python, I feel an obligation to begin the long process of sharing every weird sketch on the internet. I’ll start with Key & Peele’s “Liam Neesons & Bruce Willy” for two …
Twitter can often feel like a buzzing hive of Nelson Muntzs. A million people gathered around waiting for an excuse to point and laugh. During any major staged event—The Super Bowl, The Oscars, a State Of The Union—everyone’s internet phasers are set to “Shit On,” and suddenly it’s impossible to …
At the Sundance Film Festival this week, I expected to see technology play a large role in the form of sponsored events and panel headlines. I was not disappointed. YouTube hosted parties. HP constructed a massive tent at the center of Park City’s Main Street. I caught the tail end …
Not every day are we given the chance to watch a dude spray an aerosol can into a plastic bag then freeze the condensation to create homemade rave drugs. Today is the exception. My buddy Dan led me to this gem. WHATEVEREST by Kristoffer Borgli is the story of Marius …
Last year I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour with Charles Margulis from the Center For Environmental Health to talk about satire, activism, and ways in which the two can come together for social good. We talked about The Onion, Fuck You Congress, Comedy Hack Day, and …
We had the pleasure of virtually “sitting down with” 99% Invisible host Roman Mars only 24 hours into his latest Kickstarter campaign. The conversation streamed live, and really, you should’ve been there. But lucky for you, Youtube never forgets, so we’ve posted the full video right here. You’re welcome. As …
If you want to put creative stuff online you have a ton of options. If you want to consume creative stuff online you have even more options. But what if you want to be creative online? And what if you’re not technical? The list shrinks quickly. I’m hashing out ways …
Baratunde may host Comedy Hack Day, but Matt Klinman might now be considered the star of the show. Matt, if you read that sentence and laugh, thinking to yourself “that’s absurd,” well it’s NOT! Okay!? You’re a star, Matt! A two-time champion and A STAR!! Sorry. Where were we? Right, …
When we arranged to bring Comedy Hack Day to the MIT Media Lab, we hoped it would produce more hardware than we had seen in the past. And sure enough, we soon wound up facing the question: Does the stage have enough room for a toilet? Team Pizzicato Privy, comprised …
The teaching opportunities of a virtual pet don’t extend beyond a minor amount of detached responibility. In an effort to bring a deeper, worldview-altering lesson to the world of animated animal ownership, Comedy Hack Day virgin Benjamin Apple created My Real Puppy this past weekend at our Comedy Hack Day …
Knowing about music makes you cool, but looking up music makes you uncool; that is the paradox at the center of Sly Sound. Created by Trevor Burnham and Wes Hazard, the mobile app that works like Shazam without looking like Shazam took second place at this weekend’s Comedy Hack Day …
Cast your vote for your favorite demo at Comedy Hack Day by retweeting one of these: RT if you think #BreakerBot should be declared the Pseudo-Democratic Champion at @CultivatedWit‘s #ComedyHackDay — Cultivated Wit (@CultivatedWit) September 22, 2013 RT if you think #FatBit should be declared the Pseudo-Democratic Champion at …
“I think this is the most dangerous thing I’ve done at the Lab.” “More dangerous than the lasers?” “Yeah.” These were not comforting words for the man seated closest to the confetti cannon. A minute later, an explosion of red, pink, and white tissue paper bits filled the conference room, …
Comedy is important! Technology is important! Comedy and technology are important together! I recently sat down with Nathan Cykiert at The Verge. Mostly we just sat there, but after 53 minutes of silence and mindful eye contact, we talked about all sorts of fun things in this wide-ranging interview. Then …
I’ve been going to SXSW Interactive since 2007. Yes, I’m old. I remember lots from that first year: being overwhelmed by the lines and BBQ, catching a few SXSW Film screenings and escaping Austin just as the cool kids of SXSW Music began loading in. What I don’t remember is …
Editor’s Note: This post, while enlightening, is first and foremost a plug to have you vote for our SXSW panel. If you would prefer to be a mindless drone who simply takes orders rather than reading or contextualizing, you can follow that link right now. Thanks drone! Science has taught …
Loyalists and stalkers will recall the self-anointed “Greatest Hackathon Prize Ever” we awarded our Comedy Hack Day SF winners: an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to meet Chris Hardwick and sit in on a recording of Nerdist. Well, four months later we finally made good and sent Conor Doherty and …
The comedy world has definitely begun to dip its toes into the crowdfunding pool—Myq Kaplan ran this satirical campaign, Eugene Mirman funded a festival, and Above Average now has a ‘Thingstarter’ series—but through all my research for our AOL show Funded, I never found anybody from the comedy world who …
Like most projects I work on, Comedy Hack Day started as a joke. At the time I was living in NYC with one foot in the comedy scene and one foot in the tech scene, working at The Onion and spending my nights and weekends at tech events. The more …
New York is a literary city and also a place that you’re worried may kill you at any moment’s notice, so it’s little surprise that our first two episodes of Funded that we shot there carried similar themes. Fittingly, our trip to L.A. this past week featured cameras filming cameras …
Cross-posted from Fast Company In a reminder that “what happens at SXSW definitely does not stay at SXSW,” Fast Company captured part of a conversation I had with Behance cofounder Scott Belsky and has posted the high-quality surveillance footage here on the Internet for your viewing pleasure. In the video, …
Hi! Craig here. This is a crosspost from my blog. Every maker I know has a handful of side projects they’re thinking about building. More often than not, the projects don’t end up completed. Here’s a handful of the excuses I’ve heard and definitely used at times: It’s already been …
Two down, eight to go. That’s our progress bar for shooting the web series we’re making with AOL about successfully crowdfunded businesses. A few weeks ago, we went up to East Harlem to visit Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore. It’s the only independent bookstore in East Harlem …
Scoring a business trip to Europe then only staying for four days would be like winning the lottery and only buying a new pair of shoes. It wasn’t gonna happen. So not long after AOL agreed to bring us to France to represent our series Funded at the Cannes Lions …
We spent some time last week working with Tapestry to help us bring a little more fun and strangeness into the typical “How To _____ In ___ Steps” world. What came out of it is this guide to following Baratunde’s footsteps and unplugging from social media and email. Really, it’s …
At Cultivated Wit, we believe in making things easy. Though I wrote a 4,000-plus-word feature for Fast Company about unplugging from digital social technologies, I believe in making that work accessible via as many digital social technologies as possible so have performed an audio edition of the piece along with …
This is the second installment of our monthly video series wherein I chat with Baratunde about his monthly column in Fast Company. Only this time things are a little different because we’re not talking abou the back page, we’re talking about the cover. That is where Baratunde’s story (and face) …
This officially marks day one of our two-week corporate jaunt. We begin in Cannes, France for several days of meetings, panels, and Craig getting sun burned. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be here working with AOL and talking about creativity, storytelling, technology, buzzwords, and more buzzwords. If you’re here …
I first met Saman Arbabi the night before my opening keynote at SXSW 2012 in Austin, Texas. My friend Raina Kumra insisted I attend his talk, Iranian Outlaws: Satire vs. Censorship. I was so impressed and moved by his presentation that I asked to include some of his slides in …
How do you satirize satire? If you’re asking Dan Schultz and Matt Stempeck, the answer is: “you make it true.” Both are graduates of the MIT Media Lab, and earlier this year they created The On1on. It may not be as funny as The Onion, but the catch is that …
“Do you have any ideas for docu-soaps?” the network executive asked me out of nowhere. “That depends. What’s a docu-soap?” I asked. I was in a meeting my TV agent had set up during a visit to Los Angeles. “It’s a documentary soap opera,” she explained. “They’re really big right …
We’re doing a new thing, folks. And I have to say, of all the things we’ve ever done, this is definitely a new one. For those who don’t know, Baratunde writes the back page column for Fast Company. Starting with this most recent piece he wrote on young entrepreneurs, Baratunde …
It is often said that a business is successful if it creates jobs. We disagree. Creating jobs is a sign of massive failure for it creates “costs” and “liability.” True success would be to create labor output with no compensatory input. That would be the cold fusion of business. Thus …
As part of our relationship with AOL for our web series Funded, the entire Cultivated Wit team will be going to Cannes, France for the Cannes Lions Festival June 16-20. While there, we will attend things while nodding our heads, shake many hands, and flash a series of increasingly large …
This admittedly blurry photo is the old Onion writers room, sans table. It’s where I spent upwards of 10 hours a week for four years gaining an incredible appreciation for just how difficult it is to produce good, original comedy for more than 20 years as The Onion has. One …
At this point in my life, a full-grown adult without any kids, publicly sharing the amount of cartoons I watch would either call into question my mental capacities or land me on a sexual predator watch list. So let’s skip over that part. Instead, let me jump right to making …
We’ve always liked to consider our company as existing within the overlap between technology and comedy/creativity. Well, listening to NPR yesterday I discovered the Cultivated Wit of shooting things with a high powered rifle. Tracking Point is a startup gun company (yup, that exists) from take one guess where. Hint: …
Late night comedy shows have employed the shove-a-microphone-into-a-stranger’s-face technique for several decades now. The Tonight Show has a long history of quizzes and gotcha-type moments exposing some level of ignorance in the public. I’m particularly interested in these street interviews when the setting is the historically black Harlem neighborhood in …
We recently spoke with Patrick Moberg who created the incredibly popular mobile game Dots, but somewhere in between chatting with him and actually publishing the interview there may or may not have been a couple hundred games that transpired. In addition to learning that I should never try and write …
A junkie sits alone in his ramshackle apartment, lit only by the glow of his smartphone screen. Unblinking, he taps and slides his finger along the screen like a panicked animal. “Squares, need squares, c’mon, just one,” he mutters to the emptiness. 100. 200. 300. “This could be the one.” …
Our good friend, former colleague, and favorite in-office bodega proprietor Joe Garden posted his review of the new Facebook Phone on Thing X today. If you’re in the market for phone that both connects you with your friends and serves as a great surface for starting fires, then clearly this …
This past weekend, I was invited to join John Hodgman and Carrie Brownstein on stage as part of “The Connecticut Forum.” The Forum’s final event of the year was on Funny Smart People. Here is some of what happened as retold through tweets, photos, and vines.
Now that Comedy Hack Day is a glimmer in the rearview mirror of our gold-plated Tesla, it’s time we discuss something very serious and dear to our heart: Venture Barn.
The video above is called a “sizzle reel,” which is an industry term that means, “We are badass, and everyone should watch and sponsor this program.” That’s right, we make television now (or the thing that looks and acts like a television but still allows snobby people to say “I …
You thought we were done wrapping up Comedy Hack Day SF? You thought wrong! Craig has finished compiling highlights from our event at Twitter, and now we are proud to present the final installment of our CHD multimedia assault. Enjoy the highlights, and we’ll see you this fall in Boston.
We’ve been building a Storify tracking some of the great horribleness. [View the story “Worst Tweets Of The Boston Bombing Lockdown” on Storify] Worst Tweets Of The Boston Bombing Lockdown Tragedy often makes heroes of the least expected and supreme douchebags of others. Here is a sample of some of …
Citation Needed: Winner of The MailChimp Super Awesome Way-Better-Than-Everybody-Else Award HipCrax: Winner of the Runner-Up Award For Almost Winning But Not Quite
It’s The First 31 Hours That Matter Most Every hackathon should begin with the organizing team locked out of its offices. That’s precisely what happened to the Cultivated Wit team at Code For America—the kind folks letting us post up for a week at their office—on Saturday morning. But after …
Who would have thought a 34-hour-long event culminating in three-plus hours of a livestreamed show with more than 200 people attending and tweeting and posting photos would result in so much stuff to sift through? But trust us, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Since it’s just the three of us …
Awards Part 2 Part 1 Tweets about “#ComedyHackDay”
It’s about 3:30 am local time at Comedy Hack Day SF and we’re down to six people left awake, and one of those is the night-shift security guard. If you want to lump in Whiskey Friday—and who wouldn’t?—we’re more than 33 hours deep into the second-ever Comedy Hack Day weekend. …
This week the entire Cultivated Wit crew is in San Francisco preparing for our upcoming Comedy Hack Day. We’ve made a temporary corporate home at Code For America, which is a wonderful organization. They encourage innovation in government through technology. They also have a staircase which makes the sexy sounds …
Personalized jihads, Zipcar for dogs, yard sales for Internet business models, and a service that lets you shout at people with whom you disagree are among fake startups becoming real. Meanwhile, there’s a real video chat app that lets you have a “virtual one night stand,” whatever the hell that …
If you’re seeing this post, it’s likely you are already familiar with Whiskey Friday (aka #whiskeyfriday). However, the sad truth is that many less fortunate whiskey-drinking souls are not. We aim to fix that. As a quick aside, Whiskey Friday began as a semi-formal tradition when we worked at The …
It’s not just Friday, it’s Whiskey Friday. Before we begin pouring that magical elixir of life over cubes of frozen water, we wanted to share a few good links to carry you into the weekend. READ: Our friends at the Nieman Journalism Lab posted this interesting piece yesterday on making …
Tim Hwang builds bots that try to trick you into believing they are real. Sorry, that’s a frightening way of introducing somebody. Tim Hwang wants to have fun, save the world and make people happy… using bots that try to trick you into believe they are real. As we begin …
This is Brian typing words at you. The three of us often find ourselves listening to interesting people or participating in conversations about the future of bla bla bla. In an effort to share some of the mental spoils of those encounters with all of you, I present the momma …
O hai, this is Baratunde writing things BTW. “Hey. We’re doing this thing in Detroit. You should come.” At 8:35pm on July 30th of last year, that message popped up in my Google Chat window. The “We” was the MIT Media Lab. The “thing” was a weekend of applied brainstorming …
For best results, press play on this video, and then start reading the post below… This past weekend, I went to one of the most innovative performances I’ve ever seen. Denae Hannah, a performance artist and educator, debuted her newest show, Five Star Chick. Inspired by the Yo Gotti song, …
The first ever Comedy Hack Day was a huge success. What was just an idea a few months ago, became an inspiring weekend with over 60 developers and comedians building two dozen hilarious hacks. We couldn’t be happier with the outcome. Well, we could, but that would be greedy and …
Comedy Hack Day Demos — Live Stream Sunday @ 3:00 Come to cultivatedwit.com to watch a live stream of demos from the world’s first-ever Comedy Hack Day. Guaranteed to be 15 times more exciting than the first week of NFL football. What can you expect to see? – Pee Here! An app …
We are excited to announce that one of our first acts as a company was to apply for free money. We submitted the following idea to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge for data. We think the American people and our shareholders will benefit. If you like good things, please like …
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