For whatever reason, 23/6, the long-gestating humor blog collaboration between Barry Diller's IAC and The Huffington Post, has gone live on the HuffPo website. (The 23/6 domain itself remains password-protected.) The production has been described as "an online alternative to NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' or Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show'" but if what we're seeing here is any indication, we're pretty sure that Lorne Michaels isn't exactly crapping his pants in fear right now. Every joke feels strained, obvious, and rewritten to the point that all the humor has been drained from it (which is, we guess, the "Saturday Night Live" model): The whole thing makes VH1 webortion 24Sizzler read like a model of Lenny Bruceian comedic brilliance, and that site is such a disaster that the mentally retarded are suing to ensure that no one thinks they're its intended audience.

Now, we love us some Huffington Post: Arianna's comically-accented fearlessness, Laurie David's hypocritical stridency, and Rachel Sklar's rack have provided us with countless hours of entertainment. But this thing is almost as sad and tragic as genocide, without genocide's saving grace of at least being a well-defined plan with a clear goal. We'd smack our monitor and yell, "BE MORE FUNNY," but that would give the site credit for being funny in the first place, and with headlines like "Britney Spears Appears on the Cover of Allure: Re-Touch Me Baby One More Time," that is not a credit which we are willing to extend. We'd actually rather read Nora Ephron babbling about her sagging throat skin. DO SOMETHING, Barry Diller, this is appalling!

23/6 [HuffPo]