Comedy Central, the cable network launched to popularity by South Park and cemented by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is a part of MTV Networks Entertainment Group, and given how polished MTV.com is, one might expect ComedyCentral.com to be a solid operation. Let's take a look.
As you can see, the layout is simple, so it's not hard to find what interests you. As with most TV network websites, each show has its own page - but in Comedy Central's case, several of the shows' sites are hosted outside the main website, at their own URLs.
Comedy Central doesn't have a whole lot of original shows, but for the shows that have been anchors of the channel's popularity - South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report - they have an embarrassment of riches online.
The website for South Park, a show the network would like to keep running forever, has every single episode of all 12 seasons of the show streaming online, supported by just a few ads per episode - and half of those are parody ads created by the makers of South Park. And once you see that they have gobs of bonus content, you realize that it really is everything a TV show's website should be.
And they don't skimp on content for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the network's signature parodies of news and political talk shows. The pages for both have full episodes going back several weeks (not bad for shows that air Monday through Thursday), and an astonishing number of embeddable video clips. The Daily Show has well over 10000 videos (including more than 400 videos of guest interviews) going all the way back to January 1999, when Jon Stewart took over as host. The Colbert Report, a spin-off of The Daily Show, has built a library of over 3000 videos since its first episode in October '05, including several hundred interviews, with recurring segments and topics conveniently categorized.
Based on the recurring special political coverage starting with "Indecision 2000", election and other political content from both shows contributes to an Indecision 2008 website (which is proceeding apace into 2009) that includes its own blog.
Comedy Central's less popular original programs, like Reno 911 and The Sarah Silverman Program, have decidedly less content available online, and unsurprisingly, their syndicated shows such as Futurama and Scrubs have even less.
Comedy Central isn't all about regular programming, of course: through their Jokes.com portal, they've gone above and beyond by keeping an archive of almost 1200 stand-up comedians, each complete with a profile, short video clips and transcribed jokes for your amusement. They even have it all tagged by topic, so if you really want to watch bits about, say, marriage, you're in luck: you have hundreds of videos on the subject to keep you busy.
So Comedy Central has been... selectively thorough about pushing its cable shows across the content divide separating TV and PC. But they're apparently attempting to bridge the divide from the other direction as well: they recently entered a partnership with Atom.com, a comedy video website that produces some original content, to bring their goods to a late-night televised show.
All told, ComedyCentral.com may not be quite as impressive as its cousin MTV.com, but they've done an admirable job getting their best content online. It's a testament to the job they've done that if you're looking for a particular kind of laugh, you won't have trouble finding it.
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