Has Joe Biden finally found his match?

The Online Joke Machine
By Katherine Rosman
Thursday, September 6, 2012

Amid the comics and pundits churning out rapid response one-liners from the political conventions is the team at Someecards, a digital-greeting-card company that riffs on current events in e-cards that people are sharing online across social media sites.

By the morning after Clint Eastwood's appearance at the Republican National Convention, the website had several cards lampooning the actor's speech. One showed an illustration of a man in an old-fashioned top hat and suit. The text read: "Let's thank Clint Eastwood for raising the bar on how incoherent and embarrassing we can be this Labor Day weekend." The card has been shared and viewed more than 284,000 times, the company says.

The popularity of the cards—always one sentence with an old-fashioned-looking illustration—is boosted by people increasingly turning national events into shared experiences online. The company's goal is to capture water-cooler chatter in a way that hasn't been done by a million jokesters on Twitter or a handful of late-night television shows. The cards are posted on the company's website and can be personalized and emailed or shared, free of charge, on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter by hundreds of thousands who want to sound wry even if they aren't.

"We like to come up with things that Democrats and Republicans both can hate," says Someecards co-founder Brook Lundy, 41, who with Duncan Mitchell, 43, launched Someecards in 2007 after having worked together at an advertising agency. Today, the company is a few men sitting around a table in the back of another company's loft office space in Manhattan.

Television and film marketers are hiring Messrs. Lundy and Mitchell. They have created cards for Showtime and NBC, among others, for new films and TV series. AMC enlisted Someecards to help promote "Walking Dead." One popular card bearing an image of a horror-tale character said, "In a zombie apocalypse I'd eat you last." The four cards for the show were viewed a combined 2 million times, AMC says.

Wednesday morning, the writers at Someecards chewed over ideas tied to the anticipated speech from former President Bill Clinton. Their result: "It's nice to see Bill Clinton giving his full support to the guy who keeps Hillary out of the country."

Write to Katherine Rosman at katherine.rosman@wsj.com

Postscript Comment

Canada needs something like this for our politicians.