Episode #394
Jordy Fox Ellner is the head of film, TV and podcast development at All Things Comedy, the production company launched by comedians Bill Burr and Al Madrigal. Ellner started as a comedian himself in the late 1990s in Los Angeles, where Mitzi Shore made him a doorman and eventually a paid regular at The Comedy Store. His career transitioned in 2006 when he took over the fledgling comedy division at MySpace, and when that platform fell out of favor, he found refuge at Jokes.com and Atom.com, which eventually led him into the fold at Comedy Central, where he rose to become VP of talent and development before leaving in 2020 to join All Things Comedy.
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We’re going to jump to the 12:50 mark of our conversation, to get to the good stuff of how comedian Jordy Fox transitioned to comedy curator and executive Jordy Fox Ellner, starting with his gig heading up MySpace Comedy.
When was the first time you noticed a comedian using the Internet?
So that was kind of a transition for me. So I never intended to stop being a comic. That was my love. That was my plan. And then I got a random call in 2006, because I used to curate and — I’m gonna get to your question but — I used to do a lot of shows because I loved producing stand-up shows. It wasn’t for stage time. It wasn’t for favors. To me, I always approached it as like, just book a really cool show and people will probably want to come out to it. And so I started doing that at the (Hollywood) Improv because of Reeta over there.
Reeta Piazza, the longtime booker at the Improv on Melrose.
Yeah, who’s the best. She trusted me to book and curate great shows. And so you’d have at that time, so many great people who would go up. So I had a friend who was not in comedy, but he was in marketing. And he got hired at MySpace to run marketing. He used to come to my shows, and he loved it, and he’s in he would invite all of his friends and they were packed. And he called me one day and he said, ‘Hey, I know this is a kind of a random thing. And because you’re a comic, but you know, you have really good taste when it comes to comedy, and the people that you put up on your shows. So we’re launching a comedy channel on MySpace, similar to bands.’ And I wasn’t into Friendster. I didn’t really know about that. And then MySpace kind of capitalized on Friendster saying like, you can’t promote your bands you can’t promote being a comic, like this is purely a social network.
Right, it was purely social.
Yeah, there was a Tom at MySpace. He was real, super passionate about artists. And Chris DeWolfe, who was really the business mind at MySpace, and they they knew that there was a community that they can tap into, and they had to tap into it really fast because they must have known that others like Facebook were like, not that far behind. What I noticed when the Internet became something was when I started at MySpace in 2006. I was in a small office in Santa Monica. Before we went to the big fortress in Beverly Hills that FOX owned.
Right, before FOX purchased it. (NewsCorp purchased MySpace for $580 million in July 2005)
Yeah, it was really intimate. But like the music guys, there’s a guy over there. So Josh Brooks who was the head of marketing and music, and then comedy and film, was a big advocate. So he said, ‘Why don’t you come on as a consultant at MySpace, help us curate this channel? And, you know, you’ll still just do your comedy, but you know, we want to know who are the next funny people and you know, can we work with like the ones who are kind of doing things,’ and so I said, Yeah, I said, honestly I have no background in business. I have no background in digital. But I know the community of comedy, and I’ll give you my best sort of take into it. So I started working with them as a consultant and it was just mind-blowing. All of a sudden, everybody was just like, I have to be on MySpace. And so (Joe) Rogan really jumped in at it. You know, he was a huge, huge advocate of the digital space. And it makes a lot of sense now to see where he is today. Like he just embraced it. Which was great for me at that time, because I needed people who would embrace it. Gabriel Iglesias embraced it, like really cultivated I mean — these are guys who can back it up you know, obviously with their comedy, but they also knew how to tap into creating their own community around what they do. So (Nick) Swardson embraced it. I mean, my first meeting was with Just For Laughs, which is pretty funny because I was in the meeting and they were like, ‘Hey, aren’t you a comic? and just showcasing?’
‘Weren’t you just on the New Faces showcase?’
Yeah. I was. And all of a sudden, I’m in this room with you know, this festival. They said, we want you guys to come out there and want you to show what it’s like at the festival and so we did behind-the-scenes footage, everyday at the festival. That’s probably where I started started get to know you. I think that really opened up a lot of eyes to the comedians in the community where: I can put my tour dates up on my page and people can buy tickets. I can do, you know, Patton used to write all these blogs
Yeah. Patton Owsalt was the biggest MySpace blogger that I knew of.
He did! Yeah. And we had sketch groups like The Tenderloins and Good Neighbor.
The Tenderloins, who became Impractical Jokers.
Exactly. Yeah, and Good Neighbor — which was Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford — who were making hilarious sketches and then yeah, guys like Swardson were making sketches.
Weren’t you in a video with Swardson?
Yeah it was called Wig Thieves.
Yeah, cuz I think when I first met you, I looked you up and I was like, Oh, wow, he’s in this video with Swardson.
I got to open for him on his theater dates and he’s just a great guy. But yeah, this whole community really embraced it. It was pretty crazy. Just to be able to be someone who can help build their profile, like, more tickets being bought or being seen. It was like all of a sudden we were opening more eyes to networks and festivals and just the general public.
The two things that I remember. 1) I was working for the Boston Herald at the time. And so I got to interview Dane Cook when Retaliation came out (August 2005). And I remember even then, him really dedicating all of that success, or most of it, to his MySpace profile. He leveraged that fan base to buy the record in the opening week, which is what put it on the charts, which is what changed everything and then that in turn, got so many other comedians thinking, oh, I need to be on MySpace. But then the other thing that I remember. I was still thinking about it earlier today, knowing that we were gonna have this conversation. I don’t know why MySpace, you know, and credit to you for this too, is like MySpace did for comedians what nobody else has been able to do really, in terms of like, giving them a spot where they can interact with fans, but also promote dates and sell tickets. Facebook never managed to do that. No other platform has done that. Netflix. Comedy Central. Nobody’s really done that the way MySpace had.
Yeah. I would say a lot of the reason why we had that success was the thinking of the guys who created it. They were really trying to create a place for the artists to really put their stuff out there. And for people to find it or to really embrace it and want more of it, which made people like Patton write more blogs because they can see that people were reading it or people don’t want to put tour dates on. You know, I remember before Marc Maron did his podcast, I was like, Hey, you’re so great at, like ranting about things. Why don’t we just shoot some stuff? You know, like, on top of our roof, just ranting thing. And he’s like, yeah, why not? You know, like, whatever. So you could get a lot of talented people to do different things just because they knew there was going to be an audience for it. And it was really cool. And then that led to — it wasn’t a creation of mine, but the music guys did secret shows. This guy Isaac Walter, he’s like, you gotta do secret stand up. Like how could you not? So I did I think 40 Secret Standup shows across the world. Like Russell Peters in a small venue in Toronto. I did get a coffee house with Swardson in Austin that could only seat 50 And I think 2000 people showed up and he was like, kind of freaking out. The Mighty Boosh did one at The Roxy, and Cheech and Chong did one and Chelsea Handler and you know, you name it. Gabe Iglesias was playing huge venues, and he did one. And it was like this intimate surprise show that if the audience saw it on MySpace, they would get in to a free show. And we actually had to turn away a lot of people. But that was kind of the excitement of it. You could really generate an audience to come out to things. That was really cool. That was a really fun fun experience for me.
So despite how great MySpace Comedy was, MySpace itself, infamously fell out of favor. Like everybody jumped ship. And you eventually found refuge with Atom.com or jokes.com. What was the timeline on that?
So I spent four years at MySpace, which felt like 10 years. The first year, year-and-a-half where it was like the golden years, and then all of a sudden, I had a lot of people start to say to me, Are you worried about Facebook? I didn’t really know what Facebook was. Because I wasn’t someone who was so immersed in, like, you know, the social platforms. I really started, you know, we could see that there was a tipping point where it was like a plane really going up, numbers wise, first year, year-and-a-half, you know, we’re an ad-driven company. So numbers really needed to be high. And then it became this like, really big, you know, like, it was like a plane, just going straight for the ground the last like two years. I saw in one day, 1,500 people get fired. And most of the people around me were all gone. It was a really heartbreaking day. It was unbelievable. But I hung in there my four years, but it was definitely starting to crash. And then I got a call from a guy over at Comedy Central digital, really wanted to tap into really making more digital content. I mean, it was you know, very, very early on, YouTube was starting to really come on the scene. And so they recruited me, ‘We want you to come to New York and work here as a talent exec for the digital space.’ At that time I was just getting married, and I’m an LA guy. And I said, you know, I don’t know if I can move to New York, but I really want to work for you guys. And they said, You’ll be based in New York, but you’ll work in LA. So I was in New York-based employee. And I lived in LA. And just I had to fly to New York like 10 times a year, started to work with atom.com and jokes.com. I had some big, big, big plans and I’m not so sure that they were into my big plans, but they knew that I had a pretty good comedy background when it came to relationships. And so I really got to know the digital space again, when it came to creating short-form content, sketches, series. It wasn’t embraced it. People still felt like digital was this like cheap, last-resort alternative to, it was always about TV. And then I think as time went on, and people saw that there could be real budgets when it came to digital and that was years later. And potential to have your stuff seen and to work with people.
How involved were you at all with the Workaholics guys? They were perhaps the first to jump from webseries (they made MySpace and YouTube videos as Mail Order Comedy starting in 2006) to Comedy Central series in 2011.
Those are already in play before I got there. Walt Newman, who’s at Adult Swim and Seth Cohen — they had already picked it up to pilot, and so they were aware of Mail Order Comedy, which is what put those guys on the map. But I think that was the thinking was like, Who’s the next person we can find that can come out of this and, you know, ultimately become a hit show? You know, Adam DeVine, he was another friend of mine. He worked at the Improv. I think I was the first comic he’d ever seen. So we’ve always had this like fun history together, but in terms of that show, I didn’t really have any, any sort of part in it, but over time, I gradually moved into the linear space as a talent and development executive at Comedy Central. That was probably like five years in. I worked with CC Studios for some time. And that became more of a serious, short-form, digital content pipeline. At that time, I was developing shows for Lucas Brothers and that whole crew, which was awesome. Kurt Braunohler, we did Roustabout where he jet-skied from Chicago to New Orleans.
Wasn’t Ari Shaffir’s show also a CC Studios original?
This Is Not Happening came out of that, too. We did that as a digital series and then went on for many seasons as a linear show. Trevor Moore, who was a friend of mine, who sadly passed away a year ago, he came to me and said, Hey, I got a couple of music videos. I’d love for you to check them out. One was called Tom Hanks Is An Asshole, which was hilarious to me.
But those videos caught a lot of attention. We wound up doing two specials because of that. You know Theo Von’s Man Up Show was a digital series that went on to a pilot. Worked with Nick Swardson and Simon Rex, who was sort of the darling last year at the Spirit Awards. They had a scripted show. I had a Snapchat show with Michael Kosta, who went on to The Daily Show. So yeah, it was a pretty remarkable way to work with people and then you know, develop them. Had a lot of great experiences just just going that route, you know, just working with directors, writers. I had a show with this sketch group out of Atlanta called Dormtainment that was able to get this showrunner Rodney Barnes on, and Rodney Barnes is the guy behind Winning Time on HBO, so you know, it’s pretty remarkable that people really started to embrace that space. Idiotsitter was another one of our shows that became a series. Some things made it and didn’t have a long shelf life but it was still a cool pipeline for a lot of creators to do something without just a traditional let’s go to a script or a pilot.
And since the you know, since the pandemic, you know, you left Comedy Central, as a lot of people left Comedy Central. It’s not quite the same situation as the MySpace nosedive. It might feel that way to people. But since then, you’ve been with All Things Comedy, which is Bill Burr and Al Madrigal’s company that they started. How does it feel to kind of come full circle? Where you started out by working with comedians directly and curating. And then you went through the whole span of internet technology from MySpace to social media to video web series to linear television and now back to working with comedians.
I learned a lot from my Comedy Central days how to help support. You know, I think the thing that I learned from MySpace to Comedy Central and to where I am now. One of the things that I love about All Things Comedy is, you know, obviously it’s two really great comedians behind the company, but they also are great supporters to a lot of people and that’s really what, if I’m not going to perform, I also love the idea of helping people create a vision or at least giving them as much resources and guidance and experience to help them at least feel like I went all in and it was my vision and I took it as far as I could. And so I think what I love about All Things Comedy is it’s really supportive. Obviously we can’t work with everybody. We have our particular taste, but we really get behind people who we just think are very funny, unique. Obviously, we like people who are cool, at the same time, work hard. For me coming from Comedy Central, that was the philosophy, elevate people’s passions and their projects into something that could be something on air or give them a shot. You know, I worked on three of the last Roasts as a talent executive. So giving somebody a shot on a Roast was a big deal. So yeah, I like the philosophy of All Things Comedy. What is unique in this role for me, it was, you know, when I was at Comedy Central, I had kind of a lane that towards the end that you had to sort of stick to. I love all of it. So I don’t really want to be prohibited from working in certain areas. And it was just TV. You know, here we’re producing movies, we’re producing scripted, animation, non scripted, and podcasts, and also branded content. You get to work in a lot of different areas. That for me is exciting. Especially because I feel like there’s a huge void in comedy films.
And so, for me, it’s exciting to really try and work with people who have been writing stuff for more of the feature space. Bill just did that with his movie and you know, he’s in edit on it, but you know, it was great to have the company in general take that step. And for Bill and Mike Bertolina, who runs our company to really go and make that and then on the heels, you know, we’re doing one with Esther Povitsky, a hilarious voice out there with great acting experience and we’re going to shoot that this summer. So to really kind of tap into that space where I feel like right now is a time where people probably need more comedies, especially, you know, on the film side.
On the nonscripted side, you know, we’re just looking for ways to plug in so many funny people into things you know, without doing it, kind of the old version of a panel show, turning the genre on its head a little bit more and so, you know, we pitch a lot of different things, but it’s always with an eye towards how can we put in more people that we love into the things that we have, whether it’s casting a movie or, developing their show and then maybe building more of a package and cast around that or even an unscripted show where it’s like, you might have three great people, kind of like how @midnight was, who you know, you discover, you know, from a different way you’re like, Oh my God, this you know, like how Best Week Ever used to have Mulaney and Nick Kroll and some of those others are like, I don’t know who John Mulaney is, but he’s really hilarious on the show. And then you kind of start to look into more of, you know who these people are. And so that’s been our philosophy. But yeah, it’s great to be you know, a company that, stand-up is the background and a place that I obviously love and have been around and really trying to support people at all levels and any way we can to help get their projects made.
All Things Comedy already has a track record in the production space getting stand-up specials made, whether it was Bill Burr’s deal with Comedy Central — while you were still there, actually — to now making them for Netflix or putting them on YouTube. We were going to podcast earlier but you were deep in production on Nicole Byer’s Netflix special.
We’ve had quite a few come our way that (Mike Bertolina) personally has been, you know, running and overseeing. He did two Ronny Chieng specials and, obviously Bill and they did Whitney Cummings and Nicole Byer that we did in New York, and then he just did Franco Escamilla. And then we’ve also been doing some on our own that have been exciting to do you know, like Todd Barry in Chicago. And Gavin Matts. So again, just supporting people that we’re big fans of. Joe Bartnick, just did one. Nate Craig.
And Joe was on Bill Burr’s Netflix festival showcase as well.
Exactly. Yeah. We did Paul Virzi. We did a second one with him that again, as you know, someone that we love over here and Rosebud Baker did hers. She’s doing great things. So yeah, it’s not the core of our business, but it’s something that we really care about. And I think for us, we want comedians to feel like they can come to us, and to create the vision that they really want for their special and to make it feel special but also to do it in a way that is economic, too, and it’s not going to be super costly. There are ways to make a special. Obviously it comes down to the material and how funny it is and but then we also want to make it look great and unique and look good. So you know, we want whoever we work with to feel proud about what they’re making. So yeah, that’s been an area that we’re constantly working in. And, you know, we’re excited about it.
What has kept you in the game for so long? You know, we started out talking about how we both got involved in comedy when we didn’t even have cell phones. To just run the gamut of how the Internet has completely changed comedy, and now we’re in this weird space where I don’t know if social media is even helpful for comedy anymore, but it’s all kind of coming full circle again to you know, like you said All Things Comedy is focused on developing feature films and television shows.
Yeah, I think for me, I’ve been fortunate. I mean, I think it’s a little bit of luck. You know, I spent 10 years at Comedy Central as a development exec and talent exec. To get the experience of working on a network that long, especially one that was so known for comedy. I’m kind of in a unique position. I really can’t think of any other execs that were an actual comic for so many years. And spent so much time around the community and, really, you know, it’s like, I did open mic for years. I did the road for years. Spend time around, obviously the Store but the Improv, Comedy Magic Club. I just, you know, I’ve been around it. So I think my experience — I tend to not talk about it too much with people that I work with some people know me from those days and so there’s a little bit of like a comfort thing. Like sometimes I think there’s some some things that throw off creators, stand-ups. Especially Comedy Central, like it’s this us versus them or you know, suits or the man is holding them down kind of thing and I kind of break it down a little bit more for them like this is really more in your mind what’s going on, and you have to understand there’s a whole other thing sort of happening behind the scenes, and really trying to help people stay focused on their vision and not let the other things kind of take over. And I think it’s just being able to relate a little bit to not only the stand-up experience, but also being an exec for so many years and being able to like say like, you know, there are things that I know places might look for, for when they want to pick up a project and helping them steer them as the right way possible without compromising their vision. Ultimately, the things that I learned at Comedy Central was to support the creators as best as you can, but allow them to really die on their own if it doesn’t work out. They can get to as far as they can with something and say, you know, this was how I wanted to do it, and you can steer them a little bit away from it, if it’s going to help them but if it ultimately they feel like you know, you steer me in this path, and ultimately it failed, then, you know, it’s kind of more on me. So I try to just listen and support and get excited about what they’re doing. You can’t work with everybody, but there are some people out there that you get really excited about, and just feel like they’re doing things that are unique. And different and fresh and funny. I just think, I love working in comedy. To me it’s always been a passion, whether it’s being a stand-up and eventually moving into as an executive at a network and now an executive at a production company and producer, just really putting it all together. And it goes beyond stand-ups. There are writers out there that I just love. You know, we’re working with a writer by the name of Emily Towers, who’s on Family Guy. She’s hilarious Kevin Biggins, who was on Family Guy for many years, kind of looking for them to bring their projects to us or help other creators to elevate off of their experience. There’s, you know, directors, we’re working with a guy by the name of Brennan Shroff. He was at Comedy Central for a long time. And to me, it’s not just staying in a lane of just getting to know stand-ups, but it’s also improvisers, directors, writers, DPs, and animators and editors. It’s all of it and there’s so many excellent people in each area that really make the things that you see so much better.
If I’m not going to be a performer, which I love doing, then I can be an advocate to people and help them see their project made. Or at least try. So that’s been the resilience of it all. If that makes sense.
IT DOES! “Why not us?”
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