A Presidential Interview Between Two Ferns 1:54

ZACH Galifianakis brought the ferns to the White House, and President Barack Obama opened a new avenue of presidential communication.

The US President urged young people to sign up for the new healthcare plan through an appearance posted yesterday on the comic website Funny or Die, bypassing the news media and even previous favourites like TV talk show titans Jimmy Fallon and David Letterman.

Instead, he chose to be a guest on Galifianakis's Between Two Ferns, a digital short with a laser focus on reaching people aged from 18 to 34.

The video reached one million views within 3 1/2 hours of posting and was adding more at a pace of one million per hour by the middle of the day, according to Funny or Die.

The site was briefly the number one source of referrals to Healthcare.gov, the Obama administration said, with some 19,000 people navigating directly from the video to the healthcare website in the first few hours.

'Gone are the days when your broadcasts - or yours or yours - can reach everybody that we need to reach,' Obama press secretary Jay Carney said to broadcast journalists at the White House media briefing yesterday.

With four million views, Mr Obama exceeded in six hours the typical audience he would get by appearing on TV shows hosted by Letterman, Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. That doesn't count the ancillary views - clips of the interview aired repeatedly on CNN. And it was a topic on Howard Stern's radio show.

As hip as Fallon and Kimmel may be in some circles, their audiences skew older - a median age of 52.7 for Fallon and 56.2 for Kimmel during the last week of February, the Nielsen company said.

For web entertainment, it's a moment that rivals Emmy or Golden Globe nominations for Netflix's House of Cards. And in presidential annals, it breaks form in much the way Richard Nixon did with his awkward jokes on television's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.

In the clip, Galifianakis, star of the Hangover movies, peppered Mr Obama with awkward questions, including whether he'd put his presidential library in Hawaii or Kenya. 'What's it like to be the last black president?' he asked.

'Seriously?' Obama replied. 'What's it like for this to be the last time you ever talk to a president?'

Asked whether he would like a third term in the White House, Mr Obama said: 'It would be sort of like doing a third Hangover movie. That didn't really work out very well did it?'

Galifianakis feigned annoyance when Mr Obama, about halfway through the six-minute clip, began urging young people to sign up for healthcare, sighing heavily before muttering: 'Here we go.'

Mr Obama said: 'I think it's fair to say I wouldn't be here today if I didn't have something to plug.'

As he went on, Galifianakis asked: 'Is this what they mean by drones?'

Funny or Die was launched by Will Ferrell and partners in 2007 and has gone beyond being a niche location. There have been about 20 Between Two Ferns episodes, drawing an average of six million viewers each, and the Obama appearance is expected to go well beyond that number. Funny or Die gets 19 million unique visitors a month and has 7.8 million followers on Twitter and 5.5 million likes on Facebook.

The White House began talking with Funny or Die last year about ways to promote the healthcare plan, and the site has posted several comic videos about the topic, said Mike Farah, production president of the site and executive producer of Between Two Ferns. The interview was taped two weeks ago.

'What I really love about the video is that it's a funny Between Two Ferns first,' Farah said. At the end, the interview's black backdrop collapses and it's revealed the White House is where the appearance was taped - the joke being that's where Galifianakis does all his shows.

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