This would be the perfect tale of the gentrifying effect of Manhattan. Four kids with a shockingly puerile web site come to the big city, rent a kick-ass loft together in Tribeca and throw wild parties. After four years in New York, founder Josh Abramson (pictured center, in white), goes bourgeois. He's hired Park Avenue decorator David Howell to create a minimalist look — "but not stark," as he told the New York Observer — for his new $1.975m apartment at the Greenwich. But there's a problem with the narrative.

The College Humor boys, most of them from the Baltimore suburbs far from the edgy inner city of The Wire, were ever bourgeois. Their famous parties have always had more in common with a prom night than a bacchanal. And it's not as if Josh was ever a design rebel: the centerpiece of the last apartment was a cabinet full of crystal wineglasses, donated by the College Humor founder's mother.

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