https://www.youtube.com/embed/bTJSHoR-cQ0

There's literally nothing funny about sexual assault. Not one thing. But in the digital age, humor sometimes can capture national attention—and spur action—more readily than serious efforts to elicit public support.

That was certainly the case after the comedy website Funny or Die released a recent video to promote a new bill in the Senate known as The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act. The goal of the video was to shed light on the truly backwards laws that dictate states' treatment of assault survivors.

And it worked. Within four days, the Change.org petition tied to the video received more than 100,000 signatures, and the video itself received millions of views. But the real measure of success came last month when the Senate passed the bill unanimously. Soon it will reach the House of Representatives, where Brad Jenkins, a former White House staffer and executive producer of Funny or Die DC, expects it to pass.

"It will likely be one of the few unanimous pieces of legislation in Congress that gets to the president’s desk," Jenkins said at the 2016 WIRED Business Conference today.

A Broken System

Funny or Die's not taking all the credit—or even most of it. The inspiration for both the video and the bill itself was a woman named Amanda Nguyen, a Harvard graduate and Jenkins' former intern who is a sexual assault survivor herself. Not only was the experience traumatic, it taught Nguyen that "our system is pretty screwed up," Jenkins said.

In some states, for instance, it's legal to destroy sexual assault evidence kits after six months, forcing people like Nguyen to apply for an extension twice a year—and relive their trauma twice a year. In other states, authorities can make sexual assault survivors pay for their own rape kits.

'Many surviviors ... have collection agencies calling them.

"Many surviviors can't afford it, and they have collection agencies calling them," Jenkins said.

So Nguyen founded the organization Rise and worked with New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to get the bill introduced in the Senate. It aims to standardize states' rules around how they deal with sexual assault evidence kits so that survivors don't have to jump through bureaucratic hoops just to get justice. The Funny or Die video was Nguyen's way of building public support for this important piece of legislation.

"Like the hero she is, Amanda went through this experience and said, 'I don’t want another woman to go through what I went through,' as it related to the gaps in our justice system for survivors of sexual assault," Jenkins said. Now that future is a little closer to reality.