‘Very Mary-Kate’ a hit on the Internet

There are two Mary-Kate Olsens.

You might be thinking, “No, idiot, the other one is Ashley.” But that is someone else entirely.

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 ‘Full House’ stars turned fashionistas Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen celebrated their 25th birthday on June 13, 2011.

There is real Mary-Kate. And there is Very Mary-Kate.

“Very Mary-Kate” is the creation of 29-year-old comedian Elaine Carroll, who plays the titular twin in a Web series she writes with her husband, Sam Reich.

Very Mary-Kate takes everything the real Mary-Kate does and elaborates upon it. Imaginatively. Very Mary-Kate abandons reality for a far more entertaining place: comedy.

“What I call it is kind of ‘fan fiction,’ ” said Carroll, a native of Richmond. “Because we don’t really know who she actually is. . . . So I filled in the blanks of her world.”

Those blanks are filled in through two-minute videos, like this: Very Mary-Kate is extraordinarily wealthy. She has a $10,000 hammock and a Vera Wang Snuggie. She intends to earn her “The Bachelor” degree at NYU while majoring in ponies. She consumes absolutely no food — though she often implores her bodyguard, nicknamed Bodyguard, to fetch her “a bagel, but not a real bagel, just a picture” — and indulges in copious amounts of illegal drugs.

Reich, who directs the videos, calls VMK “a caricature. . . . You’re picking out something unique about the person, and you’re making that one thing bigger than anything else on the page.”

He stopped to consider what word best described that characteristic of the real Mary-Kate. “Vapid?” He considered this, then confirmed it. “Vapid.”

This type of Web entertainment has been around since the start of the Internet boom, according to Josh Cohen, co-founder of Tubefilter.com, a sort of “Entertainment Weekly” for online videos. There’s a whole fleet of sites devoted to professionally made original content catered to the strengths of the Internet, such as College Humor, Funny or Die, and My Damn Channel.

“More people are watching things online, so advertisers are interested in getting in front of those people,” Cohen said. “This is a trend that’s going to exponentially increase.”

Carroll, who started doing sketch and improv comedy while majoring in acting at Marymount Manhattan College, wrote the first season by herself, recycling the Olsen impression from an audition she’d had for “Saturday Night Live.” NewTeeVee, a blog covering “the reinvention of television,” wrote up the series after the first three episodes launched in 2010. AOL’s homepage picked up the story. Within a month, those three episodes had more than a million views each.

“[Carroll’s] impersonation is just magical,” said Will Hines, who plays Very Mary-Kate’s NYU history teacher. Keeping with her warped view of reality, VMK calls the average-size character “Fat Professor.” “It’s more like Dana Carvey’s George Bush from ‘SNL’; it’s a silly thing in itself. And . . . her writing is very efficient. There’s a joke every line or every other line.”

Hines met Carroll in 2009, while directing her sketch group at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City. He has performed at UCB since 2000, has taught there since 2004 and currently runs its New York school.