Sick, Twisted, and Seriously Funny

Animated comedy in the age of the Internet is a different, difficult beast to tame. For every CollegeHumor.com and SuperDeluxe.com, there are – and we're totally ballparking here – a hundred gajillion flash-animated microsites, scads of YouTube one-offs, and enough lonesome bedroom animators searching for an audience to blow even Wile E. Coyote's mind.

Just ask Austin animator Lance "Fever" Myers, whose short series The Ted Zone was picked up by SuperDeluxe.com back in 2007, only to be unceremoniously canceled when the site was subsumed by animation juggernaut AdultSwim.com last year.

"[Super Deluxe] asked me to come up with three episodes of something brand new in addition to The Ted Zone," explains Myers, "which was cool, because I was already playing around with and recording voices for these characters Skip and Lester. And then Super Deluxe went belly up."

Exeunt Super D, enter Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, which quickly snatched up Myers' freakishly funny two-minute short "Skip and Lester: Here's the Stapler If You Need It" for inclusion in its legendary traveling fest. Originally planned as the pilot for a new Super D series, "Skip and Lester" features the voice work of Owen Egerton, L.B. Deyo, and Myers. We've seen it, and it rocks.

And that's not all Myers has for you, the viewer in search of laffs. There's also that damn Internet, a medium desperately in need of some short, humorous videos that are actually funny. To that end, Myers and longtime friend Deyo (founder of the Alamo's monthly Dionysium evenings) have conceived their own comedy website, TheVideoTwo.com, which is slated to go live today.

"Nobody's really cracked the egg when it comes to figuring out a successful business model for comedy websites," says Myers. "FunnyPart.com, CollegeHumor.com, and [the late] Super D have been kind of working it out as they go along. So I figured why not start my own?"

A combination of Myers' animation output from the past decade and newly created live-action comic shorts, TheVideoTwo.com, according to Myers, will adhere to online comedy's "three-minute rule" (i.e., viewer attention spans plummet after 180 seconds, but audiences will watch multiple shorts, back to back, for hours) while simultaneously attempting to break the laugh barrier.

"I'm really looking forward to moving all my animated content to this site," Myers says, before adding, "I don't know if it's going to go anywhere or if we're going to seek advertising dollars for it. It's sort of like a blog in that the only goal is to put stuff up there. L.B. and I just like to make videos, and I'm now experimenting with shooting live-action shorts in addition to animation. So if people come, great, and if they don't, then L.B. and I will just entertain each other."

Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation opens locally at the Alamo Ritz on Feb. 20. More of Myers' animation can be viewed at www.lancefever.com.