The year was 2007, and Myspace was king. With more than 300 million registered users, it was the world’s largest social-networking platform by a mile and, since overtaking Google the previous year, the most visited website in the United States. Friendster had been thoroughly eclipsed. Google’s first attempt at a social network, Orkut, was a domestic flop. Twitter, founded in 2006, still hosted only a fraction of a percent of Myspace’s user base. Snapchat and Instagram weren’t even a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye.

When I call him to talk about the new series, This Week at the Comedy Cellar, Ray Ellin (who is known to many as Aruba Ray) is sitting in Aruba, enjoying a short break in an intensive filming schedule, right before Thanksgiving. Along with Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, Ray is the Executive Producer of This Week, a new intense stand up series that is unlike any that has been televised before. The week off gave us a chance to catch up about the Comedy Central Show that Ray has been working on around the clock since it debuted in late October.

This Week at the Comedy Cellar debuted Friday night on Comedy Central. The show zeroes in on comedians performing at the famed New York comedy club and telling jokes about that week's events, just as audiences of the venue see on a nightly basis.

As Hurricane Florence headed toward the Eastern Seaboard in September, Ted Tremper, the showrunner for “This Week at the Comedy Cellar,” realized he had a problem, and it wasn’t damage from the storm. He needed jokes.