'Potty Humor and Politics'

Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, founders of jibjab.com, have collected more than 12 million disembodied heads, and they're hungry for more. After making a name for their site by putting the heads of political figures on dancing bodies in videos like "This Land," a gentle mocking of the 2004 presidential candidates in a parody of the Woody Guthrie song, the brothers decided George W. Bush and John Kerry aren't the only ones who deserve to star in musical Web videos. "Time for Some Campaignin'," which premiers July 16, lets viewers upload images of their own faces—as those 12 million others already have—to shimmy alongside John McCain and Barack Obama. Users can also put their faces into any of the e-cards that JibJab started offering last year. Gearing up for the latest video release, Gregg Spiridellis spoke with NEWSWEEK's Samantha Henig about why he doesn't want his videos to influence voters and whether farting elves are more popular than dancing presidents. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: When you started JibJab in 1999, is this what you pictured it becoming?
Gregg Spiridellis: We didn't know what JibJab would evolve into, and that's part of the origin of the name. We didn't want a name that defined what we did. We knew that the Web evolves so quickly that if we called ourselves "thecartoonguys.com," we would quickly find ourselves constrained by the name. With the name JibJab, we can produce anything.

Who do you picture as your audience when you're writing a video?
Our content has a really broad appeal. We have almost 2 million registered members on the site, so we know gender and age information, and it's across the board: 51 percent female, 49 percent male, and in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s—basically across all age groups. That's unique on the Web because most brands tend to resonate with a specific niche.

Do you think overall they're up on the news?
Absolutely. Anecdotally, we see the people who write in to us and tell us that they like our videos, and most of them are really into the news, especially politics.

Does that give you a certain freedom when you're making videos to make them more highbrow?
We're the company that, for our Christmas e-cards, we do farting elves. When we create something, it's certainly not with an intellectual audience in mind. We try to make them fun and funny and load them up with lots of gags but then to put another layer onto it, so that if you are really aware of what's happening in the world, there might be some gags and some visual elements that you'll catch on to that the average viewer won't.

Do you consider the site nonpartisan?
Yeah, absolutely. When we produce political content, we'll literally sit down and count the gags to make sure they're even-handed. My brother and I have no political agenda other than to try to make everybody laugh. Personally, I don't like one-sided, partisan comedy because it's too easy to make fun of just one side. It's more fun if you can find the consistent threads and themes that cut across both ways and make fun of that instead.