Will Ferrell launches Funny Or Die

If Super Deluxe, dotComedy, and Comedy Central Motherload weren’t enough for you, now you have Will Ferrell’s FunnyOrDie to watch. (Are you feeling nostalgic for eBaumsWorld yet?)

LA Times writer David Sarno reports that Gary Sanchez Productions, a movie production company owned and operated by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, has gotten 1.6 million hits on its new video-sharing site FunnyOrDie since its launch last Thursday.

This is due in part to a Will Ferrell viral video released on YouTube over the weekend titled “The Landlord,” which pointed viewers toward the new site. The video finds Ferrell playing an apartment tenant dealing with an angry landlord. The angry landlord, by the way, is a two-year-old toddler named Pearl who has lines like “I want my money!” and “I need to get my drink on.”

Drawing “tens of thousands” of new viewers each hour, the site is based off user-submitted videos which get axed if viewers don’t find them funny enough. (FunnyOrDie makes good on its titular promise by sending videos with poor ratings to an archive called “The Crypt.”)

Gary Sanchez of Gary Sanchez Productions is an imaginary spokesman invented by Ferrell and McKay, but nonetheless, here’s what the fictional persona had to say about the site: “The meat and cabbage of the site will be the real peoples,” referring to users who submit their own material. There will be more celebrity-laden content from Ferrell and McKay, Sanchez says, but he promises that funny real peoples with real talent will be promptly “put on a private jet to Paraguay” for investigation and potential exploitation. So upload away and maybe Will Ferrell will fall in love you like Woody Allen fell in love with Scarlett Johansson.