HBO launches unlikely comedy experiment

By Andrew Wallenstein

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Inside the Santa Monica office building that HBO calls home, Woody Tondorf is ready to shoot his new series.

In a hallway, he stares into the camera, a Panasonic Handycam set on a tripod. His producer, Danila Koverman, stands inside an office, but her hands are visible on screen as she hands Tondorf a glass bowl filled with scraps of paper.

A handsome 23-year-old wearing jeans and a T-shirt bearing the legend "As Seen on Al-Jazeera," Tondorf fishes out a scrap and reads it to the camera.

"Want to hear two short jokes and a long joke?" he asks as his co-star in the scene, Paul Gulyas, pedals past him on a tricycle that he's about 20 years too old for.

"Joke," Tondorf says. "Joke. Jooooooooke."

Welcome to the set of HBO's newest series effort, "Runaway Joke of the Day." Only don't expect the episode to actually run on the network; it is meant strictly for the Internet. And it may be a stretch to call "Joke" an episode, given that it's over in about 30 seconds.

Absurd riffs like "Joke" are a staple of HBOlab, an unlikely off-the-radar experiment under way for nearly a year now at Time Warner's prize programmer. With an 11-member unit willing to try just about anything online, the TV industry's prime mover is finding its footing in the amorphous world of digital media. And if you mistake any of them for the rabble on YouTube, you're excused -- that's where some of the HBOlab staffers were recruited.

Michael Lombardo, president of programming and West Coast operations at HBO, envisions HBOlab tapping a creative sensibility foreign to Hollywood. "There is a whole different group of artists who work in the digital space," he said. "They're not performers in clubs, they're not pitching scripts and they're not channeled into the mainstream with agents."