He's more like a teenager who is channeled so effortlessly that you can't imagine it's an act of channeling. But the Andy Milonakis on MTV doesn't seem like anything as formal as an alter ego. There's a bit of Pee-wee Herman in all this, a grown-up playing a juvenile and mugging with abandon. But why belabor the matter? Part of the joy of his shtick is the assumption that it springs from the addled mind of a rambunctious high school sophomore, and maybe to some extent it does.
The vehicle of Milonakis's fame - the World Wide Web - makes pinpointing his date of birth pretty simple, however. "It's just annoying to me because people ask me my age like 100 times a day.
"I just hate the age thing," he says at lunch. He does comedy, after all, and there's nothing amusing about a medical condition. It is a problem he is reluctant to discuss. It's the result of a "growth hormone problem," as he told the New York Observer a couple years ago, when "Super Bowl" went national. His youthful appearance is neither an act nor a miracle of makeup. Milonakis is a former tech support staffer at a Manhattan accounting firm, and for a time he took improv classes in Manhattan in hopes of breaking into showbiz. He is also - and here comes the stunning part - 29 years old. He speaks in a slightly stoner monotone, which he peppers with self-mocking stabs at hip-hop lingo. He has arrived for this lunch wearing a red tartan-patterned shirt, untucked, standard issue for suburban 10th-graders. "At one point I was staying in a hotel in Florida, for free, looking off this balcony, on my first assignment for 'The Jimmy Kimmel Show,' all because of the stupidest thing I'd ever done in my life. "I've enjoyed it so much, I think, because of the way I got it," he says between bites of a turkey burger. Well, first he landed a bunch of on-screen cameos with "The Jimmy Kimmel Show," the late-night talker on ABC, and then he got his own show. Yes, through a chain of semi-absurd events, possible only in the age of broadband, the lad got his own show. The story should end right there, with Milonakis one of those oh, that guy moments on the inevitable VH1 special, "Remember the '00s!" Instead, he is sitting in a diner near Times Square one recent afternoon, talking up "The Andy Milonakis Show," a deeply twisted half-hour of television that airs on MTV. Within a month Milonakis had been tracked down at his home in Queens by a dozen or so radio talk shows. "The Super Bowl Is Gay" quickly achieved the sort of viral, pass-it-along acclaim that is possible only on the Internet. More than a million people did, not long after Milonakis posted it on a Web site called. "We're all gay!" he shouted at the end in a frenzied falsetto. "Gay" here was being used in the sixth-grade sense of the word, which translates roughly into "lame." Apparently everything that morning seemed lame to Milonakis - orange juice, shirts, cottage cheese, cologne, vacuum cleaners, coins, McDonald's, his dad, himself. The longer he howled, the more you expected his mom to walk in, scold him and tell him to clean up his room. He wore a rumpled shirt and had a bad case of bed-head. Milonakis looked like a Ritalin-starved 14-year-old in need of a timeout and a hobby. Super Bowl, Super Bowl, the Super Bowl is gay." "The Super Bowl is gay," he sang into his Sony video recorder, flailing away on a cheap and undersize guitar. He'd bailed on a friend's Super Bowl party, and when he rolled out of bed and decided to write a song, he quickly had a concept. His best friend, Ralphie, sneaks along and moves with him and made their old friends into household items to bring along.One morning 21/2 years ago, Andy Milonakis woke up with nothing to do. In the third and final season, Milonakis moved to Los Angeles to be with his now famous pet turtle, Herbie. The final sketch usually involves a celebrity guest. There are often animated segments, and man-on-the-street segments. There is no plot, and the sketches tend to be absurdist and silly. The show features Milonakis and a supporting cast of his actual neighbors and people from the Lower East Side, Manhattan neighborhood. The program premiered on Jand ended with its three-season run when it was cancelled on May 1, 2007. The Andy Milonakis Show is an American sketch comedy television show starring Andy Milonakis, which aired on MTV2, the first season having aired on MTV.
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