Highlighting the funniest moments, this startup aims to bring public meetings into the TikTok era

“This is, I think, the sixth time [I’ve] come here,” the woman’s public comment to the Corpus Christi City Council begins. She is wearing a full-body cockroach costume, antennae and all. “Last time, I brought you a bag of dead roaches. Some of you were offended, so this time, I’m bringing you a live one.”

This 51-second clip is a perfect example of the IRL Parks-and-Rec hilarity buried in public meeting recordings from communities across the country. It was the first such clip posted by Hamlet, a company with ambitions to use humor as a civic engagement tool and build “C-SPAN for local government,” according to founder Sunil Rajaraman. The tagline of its dedicated channel, Hamlet TV: “The human side of democracy — curated with warmth, humor, and respect.”

Hamlet launched an app for Apple TV in December, but the company is primarily focused on its TikTok and YouTube Shorts channels, Rajaraman told me. It has 164 followers on TikTok and 121 subscribers on YouTube; Rajaraman said the team expects Hamlet to surpass 1,000 subscriptions on both platforms within two months. (Hamlet TV also posts on Instagram, where it has fewer than 100 followers.)

Among the 40+ videos posted since December are:

• A clip of a man (from popular TikTok duo Chad and JT) lamenting a move to ban house parties in the Hollywood Hills (“Over the past week, I have been in a state of deep despair…I am here determined to stop this future atrocity; house parties were the bedrock of my development as a young man in San Clemente. My first introduction to manhood came when the captain of my water polo team, Boomer Kingsley, asked me to shotgun a tall can of Bud Light in front of the whole squad at his end-of-the-season bash.”);
• A Seattle woman singing a folksy original song calling out developers for cutting down trees, and the city for granting them exemptions to do so (“a magnificent tree was murdered — the mighty dollar cut it down”);
• A Scranton man complaining about Christmas lights being up two weeks before Halloween (“I heard of rushing the season, but wait a minute.”).

The clips are anywhere from a few seconds to three minutes long; Rajaraman said the Hamlet team is still experimenting with the ideal length. Most clips have around 1,000 views on YouTube Shorts, give or take a few hundred. The three top-viewed videos there to date are a taxpayer demanding removal of a sign-in sheet (35,000 views); a Lincoln resident asking the city to “remove the name ‘boneless wings’ from our menus and from our hearts” (22,000 views); and a fight between a resident and a realtor (10,000 views).

Hamlet’s most-viewed clip on TikTok is of a woman kicking someone off Zoom at a British public meeting. It has more than 400,000 views. (Hamlet overwhelmingly pulls from American public meetings; this clip, Rajaraman told me, “was an exception that I found to be pretty funny. It looks like TikTok thought it was funny, too.”)

@my_hamletIf someone tells you that you have no authority, this is your sign to take it. ♬ original sound – HamletTV

“I think you can use humor as a device to get people interested,” Rajaraman told me last month. “It’s sort of the anti-Nextdoor and Citizen…rather than using crime and fear as a way to get people engaged, what if you used humor?”

Hamlet for private clients, Hamlet TV for the public

Rajaraman is a Bay Area serial entrepreneur with some local media chops. Back in 2015, he and tech writer Sonia Arrison bought, and resurrected, San Francisco’s The Bold Italic after Gannett shut it down. Rajaraman served as CEO before selling the publication to Medium in 2019. (It has since changed hands multiple times.)

In the course of an unsuccessful campaign for an Orinda City Council seat in 2022, Rajaraman became obsessed with public meetings and noticed that many communities across the country had begun recording theirs since the pandemic. Like other media and tech entrepreneurs, he saw that trove of recordings as an opportunity for AI, combined with human verification, to “make public data easy to understand at the local level in a way that just wasn’t previously possible.” He founded Hamlet in 2022 to fulfill that vision. (The name, he told me, deliberately evokes both the small-settlement denotation and Shakespearean tragedy. He sees both as apt for a company surfacing public meetings.)

But who, exactly, would Hamlet demystify that public data for? Rajaraman originally imagined Hamlet as a resource for informing citizens, and launching public-facing Hamlet TV now is a move in that direction. But there’s also money to be made. A year after founding the company, Rajaraman received the first of many requests from real estate developers, then another from a data center developer. These companies wanted to understand individual communities’ attitudes and voting patterns on development; they stood to gain from the information buried in public agendas and meeting recordings, and they were willing to pay for it. Rajaraman decided Hamlet’s business model would be selling data to private clients.

Three years in, Hamlet has a staff of 12 based out of Oakland, and mines data from “hundreds” of communities across the country, with larger communities tending to generate more interest. By the end of January, Rajaraman expects Hamlet will be mining data from thousands of cities. It has raised $10 million in venture capital and isn’t profitable yet. Rajaraman told me the company has “over a dozen clients” and is generating “hundreds of thousands” in revenue. Most clients are real estate developers; others are data center developers and retailers.

What are these clients paying for? Rajaraman walked me through Hamlet’s customer-facing portal. A real estate developer following Irvine, Calif., for instance, can access a list or map of ongoing developments in Irvine, summaries of actions taken in recent public meetings, upcoming items of interest via agenda tracking (which Rajaraman called an “early warning system”), and deep dives on specific projects (“Haystack”) — including how public officials have voted on those projects — all pulled from public meeting videos and agendas. Clients can, and do, use Hamlet to pull this kind of information from multiple communities.

Clients can also search public meeting videos from communities they’re following for potentially relevant clips, and search transcripts for key terms and speakers.

“If you’re making a decision about operating in an American community and you just read a transcript, you don’t know if someone is upset about something, has positive body language, negative body language,” Rajaraman said. “All of that matters — to get a contextual understanding of the world, you need video and you need text.”

Beyond real estate and data developers and retailers, Hamlet’s private clients have included a PAC that Rajaraman described as “focused on a pro-housing agenda.” Rajaraman said he’s not excited about political candidates using Hamlet, and “that’s not anywhere on our roadmap.”

“We have not yet been in the position that we’ve had to turn down a client for political disagreements,” he added. He sees most of Hamlet’s clients as focused on a mission of “building in America” that aligns with his own political vision.

For all its aspirations to civic good, Hamlet’s business serving private clients struck me as an example of companies receiving higher-quality information than individuals. I asked Rajaraman if he saw any tension between his public-facing vision for Hamlet and prioritizing private clients.

“I do, and it’s something I’ll actively work through,” Rajaraman said. Working in an ecosystem with three parties — citizens, companies, and the government — “you can’t keep all three happy in building a business like this.”

Hamlet’s first paying customer was not a private company at all. The company has been working with the government of Saratoga, Calif. for two years through its GovCenter arm, summarizing public meetings directly for citizens. While Saratoga is the only current GovCenter customer, Rajaraman said Hamlet plans to do more with governments this year though he’s still deciding what shape that may take. One idea he’s considering: providing Hamlet’s search product to governments at a low cost as a resource for staff training, drawing out the institutional knowledge buried in public meetings.

Another way Rajaraman hopes Hamlet can empower citizens, as well as companies: offering the tech to local journalists for free. Rajaraman said a few journalists are already taking advantage of this, and expects to offer the free product to journalists more widely by next month. He encouraged interested reporters to reach out to him at sunil@myhamlet.com. (He also wants to make the tools freely available to John Oliver’s research team.) He hinted at a “big announcement” in February concerning Hamlet’s offerings for journalists and “some other data products that will be broadly useful to citizens, journalists, and private companies.”

Still, he acknowledged, “there’s always going to be that tension between the three.”

What makes something funny?

I watched several of Hamlet’s clips, and while the success rate at making me laugh out loud was not 100%, it was high. Costumes, and sung public comment, feature in multiple videos. Emotions tend to run hot. My favorites are funny for their blatant absurdity.

Rajaraman confirmed something I suspected after watching: These videos aren’t just selected by AI. A person reviews the videos to verify “that it’s not something that isn’t, in fact, humorous,” he said. “It turns out you need people to do that.”

Hamlet TV wants to have something for everyone, both geographically and in terms of sense of humor. A year from now, Rajaraman hopes Hamlet TV will, at least, have a clip from your state available.

Figuring out how to unearth the comedy gold moments has been a trial-and-error process. The team has searched from a broad dataset of the past 10 years of public meetings, using some from its own library and some posted publicly on YouTube. (Members of the public can also submit clips for consideration.) From that wide swathe of samples, “we came up with a broad set of things that could be humorous,” Rajaraman said, which is when the human verification comes in to determine what’s actually worth posting.

Early on, the Hamlet team thought keywords — like pickleball — could play a critical role in surfacing winners, but that approach “yielded so-so results.” Rajaraman said that length of meeting can be an indicator of contention (the longest meeting Hamlet has processed: 16 hours, with no recesses, in Loudoun County, VA). Bigger stories with national ripples — he gave the example of book banning — also tend to trickle down to intense public meetings within a similar timeframe, he said.

The national undercurrent in some videos caught my attention, and for me, their bleaker implications tended to overshadow any humor. A Christian woman calling to eliminate “demonic entities” from school boards; a diatribe against masks from 2020; attacks on trans rights.

Rajaraman said he thinks early traction indicates “our hypothesis that humor-as-a-device to get people interested in public meetings is turning out to be true.” He added, though, that Hamlet plans to do some work around “interspersing serious issues” in the coming months. The Hamlet TV landing page notes that the team aims to share clips “responsibly” and choose “clips that illuminate rather than inflame, and that reflect the real spirit of civic participation without sensationalism or distortion.”

While public comments are, by definition, part of the public record, I also wondered whether Rajaraman had any qualms about attempting to push local commentary into a national spotlight. In a word, no: “Part of the social contract is, if you’re a public official and you’re in a public meeting, or you’re a public commenter, you’re going to be recorded,” he said.

If anything, he told me, he’d love to discourage “local-vocal” commenters, a term that will have immediate resonance for any local reporter who has covered public meetings. (That one person who shows up to every public meeting, and has something to say about everything!) “I want fewer local-vocals,” he said. “Your community shouldn’t be controlled by the three or four public commenters that show up every single time.”

At the end of the day, Rajaraman hopes Hamlet TV can deliver on his original vision for Hamlet: Getting more people civically engaged at the local level.

“I want people to know the barriers to entry to getting involved in your community are much lower than you think, and you should do it,” he said. “Let’s try to get dozens of people in there. And if they come in for the humor and stay for the comment, that’s a win.”