RETIREMENT STORIES - Charlie Warner

Media Legend Laughs at Retirement
Charlie Warner - age unknown :-)

By Jesse Kornbluth, Independent Writer

Charlie says, "I am an old fart trying to recapture my wasted youth, because when I go, I want to leave 'em laughing."

Charles Warner climbed all of the world's seven highest mountains, sometimes wearing shorts and sneakers. He produced four Academy Award-nominated movies in a single year. Among his seven wives are Meryl Streep and Madonna --- he was, briefly, engaged to Paris Hilton. He wrote and recorded a number-one country hit ("My Hip May Be a Replacement, But the Rest of Me is Real").

And now, at 74, he has launched DailyComedy.com.

Well, the last is true.

The launch of a major comedy website is, in fact, just as improbable as those other claims--if geezers start websites, the subject is more likely to be health-or-hobby related than a brassy, ribald site featuring a bunch of raucous comedians.

But Charlie Warner is a media legend who really had made his mark in everything field he entered. In radio, he was a VP, General Manager, of CBS Radio Spot Sales, of WNBC-AM (now WFAN), WMAQ-AM and WKQX-FM, among others. He has also been a management and sales consultant and trainer for CBS, ABC, ESPN, MTV, NBC, Fox, and many other major media companies. He is the Goldenson Chair Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and he teaches in the Media Studies and Film Department at The New School in New York.

Warner's book Media Selling is the most widely used and authoritative in its field.

Finally, Charlie has served as Vice President of Interactive Marketing at AOL, where he was reunited with Bob Pittman. Decades earlier, Warner had taken the hand of this callow Southern teenager and put it on a turntable, launching one of the stellar media careers of all time.

But how did Charlie Warner get mixed up in the profane, smoke-filled world of comedy?

Simple. Charlie loves to laugh. And he loves people who have the power to make him laugh. The catalytic moment came when he met Ray Ellin on Joey Reynolds's all-night radio talk show on WOR-AM in New York. When he listened to Ellin, he knew he'd found a comedy soul mate. Ellin is an A-list professional comedian, ex-host of "New York Now," and producer and director of the movie, "Latin Legends of Comedy," to be distributed by 20th Century Fox.

Very quickly they came up with a shared vision for a comedy website: "America's funniest comedians. Fresh every day." The division of labor was easy, Warner would be CEO of Daily Comedy, Inc. He'd run the business, find the advertising, and, along the way, invest about $800,000 in the site. Ellin would be CCO, or Chief Comedy Officer, and be in charge of the content.

Charlie and Ray set out to create comedy history by launching a site like no other--a crisply edited home for comics who could do original, topical material. First, they hired 14 top-of-the-line professional comedians and instructed those comics not to post old bits. The marching orders: create humor--in video and text--specifically for the Internet. Says Charlie, "Stand-up routines slapped onto the Web don't really work, just as it didn't work when TV tried to take radio programs and stick them on television (I'm old enough to remember). At DailyComedy.com, we're trying to invent a new medium for the Internet."

In addition to Ray Ellin, other well-known and highly regarded staff comedians are: Dean Edwards (of SNL fame), Dan Naturman, DC Benny, Joey Vega (one of the Latin Legends of Comedy), Jessica Kirson, Jim David, Lenny Marcus, Laurie Kilmartin, Kurt Metzger, Kyle Grooms, Paul Mercurio (Emmy-winning writer for the Daily Show), Russ Meneve, Tim Young, and Tom Shillue.

To make the site as professional as the comedians, Warner enlisted a first-class roster of talent to build and support DailyComedy.com. Roger Black (website designer) is probably the leading magazine and web designer in the country. Bill Grimes (financial adviser) is former CEO of ESPN, Univision, and Multimedia; Glenn Reid (website architect) the programmer of Apple's iPhoto and iMovie, coded the underlying architecture. Jim Spencer (COO) is co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup, FYI and former VP of Answers at Ask Jeeves. [Disclosure: Yours truly serves as Executive Editor. So far I've scored a hat and a t-shirt.]

DailyComedy.com isn't just a place for comedy lovers to laugh at today's best jokes and become fans of tomorrow's comedy giants, they can become performers as well. Visitors to the site can create their own Comedy Stage and post their own material, vote on all posted material, and even suggest bits to the professionals.

Even before it launched, DailyComedy.com moved beyond the virtual and into the real world. The company has agreements with well-known comedy clubs in major cities to host sponsored DailyComedy.com shows and for DailyComedy.com registered members to attend for half of the normal cover charge.

Shortly before launch, Charlie Warner posed for a publicity picture. How does the CEO of a comedy site pose? Only one way: with a pie in his face. Was he offended? Far from it. Charlie Warner had the most fun of all. As he explains, "I am an old fart trying to recapture my wasted youth by associating with stand-up comics and starting a website that is full of jokes because when I go, I want to leave 'em laughing. I also wanted to give a message to the comics and to the public about DailyComedy.com--it's a website where the comedians are in charge, not management, and everyone is encouraged to defy and make fun of management and ownership. Everyone can identify with that. That's why I started this website--it's the kind of place where I've always wanted to work, totally unlike NBC, CBS, and AOL. I hated working for big companies; although, I had a couple of bosses I really liked and would never make fun of--Bob Pittman and Russ Barry among them."

What does Charlie Warner do in retirement? He laughs at the idea.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based writer and Internet editor, he was the former Editorial Director of America Online and has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, New York, Architectural Digest and Departures, and a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other magazines and newspapers.