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Lawson Clarke, the ad guy who bared almost all online to win a job, earns Webbys

It started because the domain name lawsonclarke.com was already taken. It got funny when his wife came home one day and asked why they had a $5,000 charge on their credit card for a bearskin rug. And it will hit its surreal peak tonight when Lawson Clarke, a Boston ad man who got laid off last year, accepts two Webby awards, the Internet’s equivalent of the Oscars.

This is the story of the Male Copywriter phenomenon. Or, as Clarke describes it, “the story of a guy who got naked to get a job.’’

Last year, Clarke, a 38-year-old copywriter originally from Hingham, saw trouble lurking in his industry. “You didn’t have to be Kreskin to realize the ad industry was going to take a nose dive, so I started blowing up the life raft,’’ Clarke said recently over a pint of Sam Adams at T.C.’s Lounge, near his home in the South End. “It’s a cliche, but in tough times the first thing that goes is the ad budget.’’

At the time, Clarke was working for Arnold Worldwide, the large Boston advertising agency, and he started preparing for the inevitable by building a portfolio website. He found that a British PR agency with the same name already owned the domain name, so he started trying to think up a funny alternative. He settled on malecopywriter.com.

“Then it was, ‘Well, what does Male Copywriter look like?’ Well, he looks like Burt Reynolds in the Cosmopolitan spread,’’ he said, referring to the iconic 1972 image of a naked, and hairy, Reynolds lying on a bearskin rug. “I knew a lot of really incredible creatives were going to be out on the street, so I needed an extra little something to stand out. And I wanted it to be the sort of thing that would make me laugh if it came across my desk.’’

Clarke hired a photographer, spent a good deal of time trying to rent a bearskin rug (he ultimately had to buy and return one), grew the requisite bushy moustache, and studied the Reynolds photo “longer and in more detail than any heterosexual man really should,’’ he says.

He posed for a more-than-awkward photo shoot — “The photographer kept saying, ‘I can still see your underwear,’ so I had to go all the way’’ — got the website ready, and just as he was preparing to launch the site, it happened: He got laid off.

“In some ways,’’ he said with a look that says he can’t believe he’s actually saying this, “getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to me.’’

His wife, Gable, was two months pregnant with their first child, and the layoff lit a fire under him. “Well, first I went on a weeklong drunk,’’ he said. “Then I launched the website.’’

Now that home page, which was chosen as the best of the Internet by the Webbys, has become an icon in its own right. It features a hairy Clarke in a side recline on a seven-foot-long grizzly bear rug, his lips pursed into a come-hither gesture straight out of a ’70s porn film, a retro television set hiding the parts that need to be hidden. If you click on the links to his portfolio, the site zooms in to the point where it’s nearly impossible to tell where the bear fur ends and the naval fur begins.

Malecopywriter.com almost immediately became a cult sensation within the advertising world, the sort of thing people e-mailed each other. Last May, after a glowing write-up in Ad Age, the industry Bible, it exploded; his website has received more than a million hits.

But the attention would be all window-dressing if he didn’t have a solid portfolio, according to Laurie Brandalise, a Los Angeles-based advertising headhunter who has worked with Clarke.

“It was a great concept that helped him stand out from the crowd,’’ Brandalise said, “but at the end of the day what clients care about is that he’s a great writer.’’

Since his portfolio went viral, Clarke has found so much freelance advertising work with companies such as Royal Caribbean and  FedEx  that he chose to pass on a couple of full-time job offers in favor of more free time “so I could take my baby to a bar,’’ he said as Fox, his cute little 7-month old boy, watched “Yo Gabba Gabba’’ on the television in T.C.’s. On the advice of his brother, who is also in advertising (their father owned an ad agency), Clarke took his new Male Copywriter brand to Twitter, where he now has more than 2,000 followers. “Twitter is the perfect venue for an advertising copywriter, because you work in headlines anyway,’’ he said.

Then came the biggest shock of all, when Clarke was nominated for two Webby awards for best home/welcome page, and best self-promotion/portfolio site. A month ago, he found out he’d won both. Tonight, he’ll attend a gala ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York to accept his awards, where he’ll have to stick to the Webbys’ famous five-word speech limit.

“I knew the Webbys were kind of a big deal, but I look at it now and there are some pretty big names up there,’’ he said. Other winners include New Yorker magazine, Jim Carrey, Twitter, Hulu, Flickr, Sesame Street, NASA, the Onion, and The New York Times. “And me, the guy who got naked to get a job.’’

Clarke, who has the laid-back affability of the kind of guy you want at a Vegas bachelor party, can’t help but laugh at what body-hair exhibitionism and a funny domain name have given him. But unemployment is a deadly serious thing for millions, and he thinks there’s a little lesson behind his success.

“There’s this old saying, something like ‘Don’t be the person who’s looking for a job,’ ’’ he said. “ ‘Be the person who’s doing something interesting.’ ’’