Comedy Central serves up a uniquely American brand
of humor. What is your strategy for selling the channel to a global audience?

Bill Roedy: With 135 channels, we are the largest collection of channels in the world: MTV is the biggest, with an audience of about 1.5 billion, and Nickelodeon is right behind that. Our strategy from day one has been local, local, local. We pioneered that strategy. In the past couple of years, we decided to apply it to Comedy Central.

Over the past 24 months we’ve taken it to where it is now. We have 150 million households worldwide and seven websites. The aim is to take it everywhere. I’d like to see the Comedy Central brand as powerful as MTV globally. Our key strategy is to go local, but Doug and his team have come up with shows that travel. We can take those shows and put them with formats of other shows and combine that with local programming. We have the infrastructure worldwide with MTV and Nickelodeon, so we are able to expand fairly quickly. The idea is to have a portfolio of brands that brings in the adult demographic and combine that with MTV and Nickelodeon—then we have all the demographics covered.

Humor is such a culturally specific thing. How do you create programming that will, as Bill says, travel?

Doug Herzog: We are always trying to create something that is funny for the Comedy Central audience. Traditionally, this stuff did not travel particularly well. Yet we found that over the years, American comedy, and particularly the Comedy Central brand of comedy, has started to travel a little bit. Certainly animation—because you can redub it—travels a little better. But some of the more specific stuff is gaining an audience too, like Jon Stewart and The Daily Show or Dave Chappelle, things like that. As large and as far-flung as the world is, it is getting smaller every day. People have access to things they did not have access to before and, consequently, roads are built.

Roedy: The key thing for us that makes a product travel is language. When you can dub in different languages, that helps. When you have shows packaged locally with local management, that addresses some of the burden. The real key is to tap into local production. That is what we have done with all the other channels. As for those shows that do travel—South Park for example—we’ve used them on MTV until we gain a following. South Park has been very successful on MTV. And many of these shows have been very successful on a syndicated basis. That supports the Comedy Central brand and makes it easier to launch a channel.

So you develop specific shows for specific markets, for instance shows that offer Polish or German humor to those specific audiences. Do you also look for a common ground above that level?

Herzog: We are not at that stage at Comedy Central domestic. But we keep our eyes open for opportunities, and MTV Networks has a global presence. It certainly is not lost on us at Comedy Central that landing on something that would play across the world would be a real bonus.

Roedy: With regard to programming that we produce in the States for international broadcast, we’ve done some of that with MTV and a lot with Nickelodeon. Long term, we will do it with Comedy Central, too. It makes for some interesting combinations.