milonakis miloshnakis

Don't Cry For Me, Milonakis
TV Review: MTV's Andy Milonakis Show
for The New York Sun
By Adam Baer

A couple of months ago, when I first read in Variety that the 29-year-old Lower East Side comedian Andy Milonakis had scored a development deal with MTV to write and produce his own comedy show, I phoned my editor at this newspaper and asked for an assignment to interview the man. He wasn’t just newsworthy as a local comic made good. He had gotten noticed in a particularly zeitgeisty manner: He had made homemade videos of his sketches. He had posted them on his blog. And he had then heard from writers at the ABC late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live" that they: a) found his work hilarious, b) had sent it up to the Oz-like Mssr. Kimmel, and that c) he just might be taking his comedy from the bowels of Downtown New York to that more culturally astute neighborhood called Hollywood.

No, the Internet wasn’t exactly new, but video-blogging -- so successfully, in fact, that it could result in a development deal -- was. So I was particularly surprised when MTV denied me an opportunity to interview their new star. Was Mr. Milonakis shunning the opportunity for press? Did he feel, with the considerable Hollywood muscle of such A-list players as Jimmy Kimmel and the people who bought “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic” behind him, that he simply didn’t need notice in a New York daily newspaper?  I was vexed.

My confusion has dissolved, however, upon witnessing, a few Sunday nights ago, the premiere of “The Andy Milonakis Show”: twenty scripted minutes of one to two-minute sketches -- a senseless video blog on the fastest T1 line known to man.

Milonakis, it seems, didn’t deny us an interview because he felt above the level of local press. He most likely denied one because, as he has proved in his television debut, he doesn’t have anything original to say.

The cherubic, chubby-cheeked man-child with the high voice and ill-fitting shirts began his TV debut by opening a giant Pez dispensor in the shape of a chicken -- only for said chicken to then speak to its owner the words: “You’re a fat murderer.” The rest of the show’s opening continued in this random, pointless vein.

Picture the scenarios: 1) Andy walking up to random Lower East Side seniors thanking them for their tapioca pudding. (See the humor? Andy has never met these people before, and they might get confused as opposed to annoyed because they’ve actually lived longer then 29 stunted years.) 2) Andy speaking to his dog as his dog dreams of shooting him. 3) Andy placing a delivery for Chinese food only for the delivery man to arrive to find Andy bound to a chair with peanut butter slathered on his face. (At which point, Andy asks the man to apply more peanut butter to his doughy chin, then screams at him.) 4) Andy accidentally cutting his finger off while chopping vegetables and then taping it back on.

This is certainly what I would have e-mail my boss about were I lucky enough to have scored a writing job on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Of course seeming higher than thou isn’t necessarily a fair way to approach comedy scripted for the mature audience that enjoys MTV’s “Sunday Stew” programming. Yet as a young man who isn’t so far out of Ashton Kutcher’s age-range, I admit that I do, occasionally, watch “Punk'd.” I do enjoy the car-modding show “Pimp My Ride.” And I do -- he admits sheepishly -- ocassionally surf the Internet while (this season's particularly bland season of) “The Real World” blares in the background.

Just because a channel and its most heavily watched primetime slot is skewed to teenage tastes, after all, doesn’t mean you have to completely dumb down its offerings. But what Milonakis's show proves -- in a latter portion of the program, he makes a homemade advertisement for spoons, explaining their many, unique, uses -- is that you don’t have to be funny to get a comedy deal. You just have to look freakish, immitate some David Letterman "man on the street interviews," and scream common-sense observations. And it will help considerably if you can lower the country’s collective attention span even more powerfully than the Internet by throwing piles upon piles of super-short clips on top of one another so that: a) there’s absolutely no cohesion to your show, and b) your viewers won’t crave any next week -- from you or anyone else.

Towards the end of Milonakis’s debut show "Crunk" rapper ‘Lil Jon -- famous, among other things, for screaming the word “What” with his phlegmy bass-baritone -- makes an appearance. He speaks to Andy through his TV, then jumps out of the box to share and spit some “Fruity Pebbles” cereal in the comedian’s face. The semantic threads of reality TV are knotted here in the most distasteful bundle. The conceit is that ‘Lil Jon is so big -- so untouchable -- that this reality-thwarting act could only have been dreamed up by a crazed boy-comic who makes Internet videos in his apartment.

How sad, however, that the opposite is true: Not only does neither character deserve his fame, however miniscule it is. Neither character is fantastical. Each is as everyday as that random, forgettable schmuck who screams at you on the street on your way out to run an errand. And when’s the last time you laughed with, as opposed to at, someone like that?