When Barack Obama met Zac Galifianakis

American President pitches his health care plan on Funny or Die.

ZACH GALIFIANAKIS BROUGHT the ferns, and President Barack Obama opened a new avenue of presidential communication.

The president urged young people to sign up for the new health care plan through an appearance posted Tuesday 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’ Between Two Ferns, the digital short with a laser focus on reaching people ages 18 to 34.

The video reached 1 million views within three and a half hours of posting and was adding more at a pace of 1 million per hour in the middle of the day, according to Funny or Die. The website 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 health care 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 press briefing on Tuesday.

With 4 million viewers, Obama exceeded in six hours the typical audience he would get by appearing on television 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 the video was a topic on Howard Stern’s radio show. By nighttime, the video had more than 8 million viewers.

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 much like Richard Nixon did with his awkward jokes on television’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

In the clip, Galifianakis peppered Obama with awkward questions, including whether he’d locate his presidential library in Hawaii or Kenya.

“What’s it like to be the last black president?” he asked.

“Seriously?” Obama said. “What’s it like for this to be the last time you ever talk to a president?”

Galifianakis feigned annoyance when Obama, about halfway through the 6-minute clip, began urging young people to sign up for health care, sighing heavily before muttering, “Here we go.”

“I think it’s fair to say I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t have something to plug,” Obama said. As he went on, the Hangover star 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 6 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.

Television talk show appearances have since become an accepted part of the political circuit. The president played along with Fallon’s “slow jam the news” skit in talking about student loans in 2012, when he was running for re-election.

He’s done interactive Web appearances with Linked In, Google and Twitter, said presidential spokesman Joshua Earnest. But it wasn’t quite like Galifianakis questioning him about whether there’s another presidential pardon for a turkey in order or showing him a rash on his arm.

The White House began talking with Funny or Die last summer about ways to promote the health care 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.