Subscribe
Previous Post
Okay, we cheated: CollegeHumor’s Streeter Seidell isn’t that anonymous. After all, he’s just about to start the 3rd season of the MTV show Pranked with his friend and coworker Amir Blumenfeld, based on their Prank War series that began on Vimeo. Then there’s the fact that for a lot of college kids out there, Streeter and the rest of the Hardly Working actors on Ricky Van Veen‘s site are more recognizable than SNL actors. (Seriously, try to get a college freshman to name-check Jason Sudeikis…it’s impossible.)
But Streeter, who joined up with CollegeHumor.com in 2005 after a late night session reading the site while enrolled in Fordham, still has problems with name-recognition. “People ask about fifty percent of the time if it’s my real name,” the actor/writer/comedian told us during a recent phone call, “When making reservations or ordering food, I’ve just started calling myself Steve. Now Steve is developing his own personality.”
This might sound like facetiousness, but some of Streeter’s most famous characters have come out of a similar process. “A lot of times it’s just this weird idea or character that develops in the office, and we keep building on that until it’s developed. With Gunter (the German marketing guy), it came from being on the road with Jake (Hurwitz) and Amir and Jeff Rubin, when we were touring colleges. All three of them were Jewish and I wasn’t, so I kept coming up with the most offensive things you could possibly say, and that was Gunter.”
What about CollegeHumor’s Phantom? “We’re in touch,” Streeter says coyly, “We’re friends, but I’m not him. I can tell you that his next video is going to feature a lot of singing. And he’s not a very good singer.” And apparently not an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan, either.
Besides wearing the hat of Executive Editor of College Humor Media (the job titles over there are insane), Streeter is also working on their new site, Dorkly.com, which is for video game nerds, and SportsPickle.com. He’s also back to doing stand-up in his spare time, which he is unsurprisingly short on. (Dude hasn’t even seen Inception yet, which might actually be reason enough to be fired over at the CollegeHumor offices.) He’s also really into his Tumblr, on which he’s started getting into “image macros” of old pictures of people wriding bikes. He doesn’t expect anyone to like it, “but that’s the great thing about a personal blog.” Who knows…it could get a book deal, right?
Streeter laughs, “I highly doubt it.”
