The early days were difficult for a cable channel on a tight budget. With no money to lure the hugely popular comedies of the time, such as “Roseanne,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Blossom,” the channel broadcast mostly stand up comics and reruns of movies with low re-broadcast costs. Further complicating the brand’s rise was that many Americans of the era, believing the USSR collapse to be a trick, viewed laughter as a show of unpatriotic weakness.

Comedy Central did have two early successes: “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher, which became popular and sold up to the ABC network, and “Mystery Science Theatre 3000,” which sold down to the Sci Fi Channel. Then came “South Park.” Its lowest denominator never more common, Comedy Central was suddenly on the map in a big way, all thanks to obscenity-spouting children and chocolate salty balls. The added bonus? “South Park” was too appalling to sell to a larger, more mainstream audience.

On the way to making people laugh, the brand made people think, which as any TV producer worth salt will tell you is very, very stupid. The feather in the brand’s thinking cap today is “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” a show that rewrites how news is disseminated in America. Similarly “important” shows include “The Chappelle Show” and “The Colbert Report.” The channel’s recent forays into award-winning “journalism” shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who has watched the channel since its beginnings, when it featured shows starring Al Franken, Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington, all of whom went on to become painfully serious.

From a branding perspective, Comedy Central’s name is its biggest asset and its largest challenge. As its name concisely and efficiently implies, comedy is central to the brand’s vision. While many brands might go with some fancy schmancy, aspirational name, like Lauftriasmilia, Comedy Central’s name communicates brand clarity.

Turns out, comedy is a vast subject to be central to. As viewers continue to abandon the networks, the cable landscape has become even vaster and more complex, a brothel of channels all whoring for a piece of eye-traffic. Some of these channels abandon direct competition by appealing to minor, targeted fetishes, such as video-game themed G4. But humor? Drama? Athletics? The bulk of the other cable channels have found that it’s difficult to make a brand out of a genre.

And that brings us back to anal probes. “South Park,” Comedy Central’s first big hit, appears to be the key to the brand’s future. In last year’s Beta Research Brand Identity Study (for top-ranked major cable networks), Comedy Central was ranked highest for “risk taking” and “bold/tries new things.” There’s no doubting that these results correlate to the brand’s first place finish in the study’s “entertaining” category.

What is the future of Comedy Central? Four score and seven years from now (or 2008, whichever comes first), the channel will be faced with losing its most popular franchise player, Jon Stewart, host of “the Daily Show.” Having scrapped its mind control project, Comedy Central is obviously looking for replacements or what’s known in the biz as “tent poles”—those few good shows that make up for the vast majority of the un-watchable programming. It has some promising leads and appears poised to continue its success in diverse, quality comedy, leaning toward acclaim as one of the strongest brands in broadcasting.

Unless the FCC allows hard core pornography on basic cable. Then all bets are off.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1) Which branding specialty would make the best Comedy Central faux reality show?

1. Package Design
2. Verbal Identity
3. Strategy

2) If New Yorker had a comedy channel, how fast would you end your life to avoid watching it?

3) Seeing as Jon Stewart’s “America: The book” sold a few million copies in the US and brandchannel is an international publication, what percentage of our readership will not “get” this profile?

Abram Sauer lives in New York City.