• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 6, 2015

Online video is nothing if not just bite-size and usually irreverent. And by now, irreverent is so overdone it must be harder and harder to find the reverent base to skewer. 

But the briefly irreverent category works well on mobile devices and gets buzz on social. Joining that camp is AOL’s new “2 Point Lead,” a short-short online video featurette that will generate a new episode at 2 p.m. Eastern every day, starting today. It is hosted by up and comedian Yannis Pappas, but it also features other well-known comedians doing sports riff and athletes themselves being as funny as they can be. The show also includes Nick Creegan, winner of an AOL SportsSearch contest last year.

“We want to capitalize on the die-hard sports fan and even the casual sports fan who checks out their smartphone for a few minutes in the afternoon,” said Brian Fitzsimmons, AOL’s sports editor. And because “2 Point Lead” is not really pegged to sports news in any immediate sense, the content can stay relatively fresh until the next day--though today’s show will be pegged to the beginning of the baseball season.

The format itself is, apparently, flexible enough that what you see this afternoon is no predictor of what you’ll see a month from now.

“We’re giving ourselves some leeway,” Fitzsimmons said.  “One of the cool things is that we have a library of content, of evergreen-type stuff,” so  “2 Point Lead” can wander around pretty liberally to find its funniest slippery bananas.

What it is not going to be Fitzsimmons says, is the kind of snarky humor that can be found in profusion online. “This is not going to be ‘point-the-finger-and -augh’ humor,” he says.
Right now, what it’s not going to be is a lot easier to determine.

The promo is a quick clip job of silly stuff, none of which seems so hilarious. But hyping funny is seriously tough work. “Fans Can’t Get Enough Scores, Highlights, Analysis,” an introductory supergraphic shouts. “This Is Not That.”  

AOL research discloses that 73% of users engage with the service via smartphones and 84% percent of millennials use AOL while otherwise watching sports. So this little silly companion--just a little more than two or three minutes long--is the perfect munchable.

There is not, I guess, a daily sports comedy place online, but ESPN has been laughing through a good part of the day for most of three decades. Still, anything that would take sports a little less seriously is not automatically a bad thing.

It would seem that “2 Point Lead” is going for engagement. If it’s funny, you tweet it. And if it’s tweeted, somebody else might see it and drift over to AOL more often. Advertising doesn’t seem to be in the picture yet. I don’t see it at AOL’s other new-ish news product, “AOL Rise,” either, when it daily offers a breezy and usually thoroughly pointless two or three minutes of news headlines. But that is apparently its purpose. People don’t have time for that other reverent stuff.