In those six years, Mr. Abramson and Mr. Van Veen have since graduated, and their little Web site, generically named CollegeHumor.com, has become the engine behind a thriving Manhattan-based media company. It is a fresh reminder that like Craig's List, some of the most successful Internet ventures have come not from spreadsheet-wielding M.B.A.'s but from people doing what comes naturally. Four million to eight million unique viewers stop by CollegeHumor each month, most of them young men, and in the first half of this year, the company took in $2.4 million from advertising and T-shirt sales, its founders say.

Those kinds of numbers have drawn the attention of old-media companies eager to connect with CollegeHumor's audience. Dutton recently bought "CollegeHumor's Guide to College," a spoof on college orientation manuals, and last week, Paramount announced that it had signed a development deal with the company to create CollegeHumor-branded movies, in the vein of National Lampoon, which lent its name to movies like "Animal House." Mr. Abramson and Mr. Van Veen have taken meetings -- a phrase they use earnestly -- with Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," and executives at News Corp. and Viacom, who were eager to meet them. And veterans of the New York digital media scene have watched with wonder and not a little envy as a couple of boyish-looking recent college graduates with an improbably simple idea have injected some of the old optimism into a scene many had written off as dead.

"There is a whimsical and joyful way to the way they execute that is reminiscent of the way people approached this business in '95 and '96," said Rufus Griscom, the chief executive of Nerve.com and an old hand of New York's digital publishing scene. "Their age is key to their success not only because they are their demographic, which is always good, but because they are willing to do wacky things. They have a healthy obliviousness to the way everybody else is doing business."

Indeed, Mr. Abramson, now 23, and Mr. Van Veen, 24, have set up CollegeHumor to conform with the typical college kid's idea of a workplace utopia; most of their employees are buddies from school. The 11 staff members work in a newly refurbished 4,800-square-foot TriBeCa loft, where they occasionally have beer-soaked and ice-cream-laden pajama parties. In one room, Web developers have pitched a tent, where they have been taking turns crashing during late-night sessions required for a site redesign. In another, writers sit wearing headphones, lost in their iTunes. (CollegeHumor pays its writers, all recent graduates, $36,000 a year.) In another office, a 21-year-old monitors the supply chain of CollegeHumor's apparel business, which sells T-shirts online and through retailers like Urban Outfitters and Filene's. There's a full kitchen and laundry, and an empty space up front that practically begs for some sort of gaming table.

"We're not getting a Ping-Pong table," Mr. Abramson said. "Because we heard The Onion has one."

On the surface, Mr. Abramson and Mr. Van Veen seem to lead the swashbuckling lives of their dot-com-era predecessors. Both bachelors, they share a loft three floors below their office, with a 52-inch TV, a new billiard table and a grand piano. And they're among the youngest members of the SoHo House, the trendy social club, where on a recent visit their bemused waitress seemed to look around in vain for their parents.