On March 11, when the video debuted on FOD, traffic on Healthcare.gov spiked 40 percent, according to the White House—a clear demonstration of FOD’s connection to the uninsured millennials the administration was so desperate to reach. "We are proud that over 24 million Americans have watched the president and Zach inform the country about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act between those two iconic ferns," says White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Adam McKay, the writer and director (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) who founded FOD in 2007 with Will Ferrell and Chris Henchy, was even prouder: "I told the guys, ’That video probably saved 2,000 lives! When does that ever happen?’ And the greatest compliment of all was that I actually laughed. It didn’t come off like some sweaty policy piece. It was a historic moment. If you look back at the past hundred years in comedy, there’s that Colbert White House Correspondents’ dinner in front of Bush and the Nixon ’Sock it to me.’ There’s the first time we saw Albert Brooks’s Real Life and Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. I would put that Obama piece on that list. And Will and I had nothing to do with it. That was the coolest thing. Out of nowhere, to go get the frickin’ president and then do a funny piece about this nonpartisan issue that has been turned into a partisan issue? Yeah, I was incredibly proud."

Team FOD: from left, Andrew Steele, Dick Glover, Chris Henchy, Adam McKay, Mike Farah, and we don’t know who that bearded guy is.

For Mike Farah, FOD’s president of production, the video was the fulfillment of a long-term goal. Six years before, he’d made a wager with himself in the form of a handwritten contract: At some point, the site was going to make a video with the president of the United States. So when Farah saw Obama at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in May, he showed him the "contract," which was little more than a scrap of paper. The president pulled out a pen and signed it, adding a coda: "I’m glad you won the bet."

Can you believe it’s been seven years and 3 billion views since "The Landlord" —2-year-old Pearl, played by Adam McKay’s actual daughter—stood on that doorstep and shrieked to Will Ferrell, "I want my money, bitch!"? Neither can Ferrell. "We’re still amazed, on some level, that it’s still all happening," he told me recently.

In the ensuing years, the site has evolved from a playground for Ferrell and his funny friends into the gold standard for comedy online—and a booming business that has one foot in Silicon Valley and the other in the town that it is helping to change: Hollywood. The site has been impressively nimble in straddling the art-commerce divide, preserving its creative autonomy while getting videos made quickly and inexpensively, under a range of envelope-pushing deals with advertisers. With over a hundred employees, it has an in-house production facility where it makes its videos and, increasingly, TV series based on those videos, plus a slate of feature films in development. Add to that the site’s always-ahead-of-the-curve engagement with social media (FOD has three staffers dedicated to nothing else) and the answer to the question "What’s next for Funny or Die?" becomes more than a mere curiosity. In a very real way, FOD is inventing the kind of entertainment that will make the future laugh.

It almost didn’t happen at all: Ferrell and McKay admit that if they’d followed their original instincts, the site would never have gotten off the ground. Mark Kvamme, a partner at the famed VC firm Sequoia Capital, teamed up with the head of business development at Creative Artists Agency to pitch them the idea. Thanks, Ferrell and McKay said, but no thanks. "We thought, ’Well, why would we do that?’ " recalls McKay. It was their manager, Jimmy Miller, who persuaded them to reconsider. Kvamme wasn’t asking them to invest any money (Sequoia funded the start-up), only creative energy. "Jimmy said, ’It will just be a fun little thing, and if, by chance, it hits, great.’ We couldn’t argue with that," McKay recalls. "We thought it was going to occasionally have a video that got a million hits, but most of the time it would just be a few thousand and a good place to goof around. And then, of course, ’The Landlord’ hit and immediately thrust it into the deep end."