No, we’re not getting into the original-comedy business like our siblings over at The Onion. At The A.V. Club, we do a fair amount of interviews and other articles related to comedy world, but they’ve never really had a place to live on avclub.com. Comedy-album reviews were wedged into the music section, interviews with comedians were usually shoved somewhere that didn’t really make sense, and Podmass never had a place to call home.
That changes today with the launch of our new Comedy channel, or “vertical” as they say in the biz. (That’s short for “business,” to steal a bit from Scott Aukerman.) It will be home to all of our content related to stand-up, sketch, improv and comedy in general, as well as Podmass. Although our surprisingly controversial podcast-review feature doesn’t focus exclusively on comedy podcasts, it fits there better than anywhere else.
Speaking of Podmass, the Comedy vertical will also be home to Podmass Central, a new podcast aggregator that has us very excited. It will allow you to play episodes directly from the podcast’s stream, without having to go to iTunes or other sites, and serve as a nice companion to Podmass. Right now you can find all of the Earwolf and Nerdist podcasts along with some others, but we’ll be adding more over the coming days until we hopefully have everything we cover in Podmass (and others that we don’t but like).
We also have some awesome new comedy-oriented features that we’ll roll out in the coming months, so stay tuned. In the meantime, watch this: