Read This: How A Special Thing played a crucial role in alt-comedy history

It may be difficult to believe in 2016, but back in the primitive days of 2001, there really wasn’t a good place to discuss comedy, particularly alternative comedy, on the internet. That year, Matt Belknap, currently best known as the producer and co-host of the Never Not Funny podcast, helped change that by creating an online forum called A Special Thing (or AST), originally to discuss Tenacious D and Mr. Show With Bob And David. AST soon became the online hub of the comedy world, with future stars such as Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, and Aziz Ansari participating in the threads and Q&As. Over at The Kernel, writer Rick Paulas has put together a definitive oral history of A Special Thing, documenting its rise to prominence and eventual decline, including testimony from such luminaries as Scott Aukerman, Jimmy Pardo, Todd Glass, and more. When summarizing the importance of this message board, Jimmy Pardo puts it succinctly: “Facebook wasn’t around. MySpace wasn’t big. Twitter certainly wasn’t around. If you wanted to read about comedy, you had to go to AST.”