The Andy Milonakis Show

After my Dad started working at Comcast, we got cable for the first time – and it was an embarrassment of riches. With the employee benefits, we had thousands of channels for free, so we were discovering new shows left and right. Of the shows we knew nothing about, one stuck out that we tried to watch together whenever it came on: The Andy Milonakis Show on MTV.

If you watch the theme song I’ve posted, you’ll see how the show was set up. It looks like the low-budget type of home movie a 15 year old boy would make, with the same type of humor and the same special effects. We were instantly captivated by this little kid, and couldn’t believe he could come up with the short sketches that made up his show. The things this boy did were hilarious, but then there came a revelation:

Andy Milonakis is actually a 30-something year old man.

He has some sort of growth hormone condition that has slowed the look of his aging, according to this article from the Washington Post. But when my family found this out, Andy did not just stop being a little boy, he stopped being funny.

Watch this quick video of one if the skits from the TV show:

It’s a typical sketch; it starts off with a “hand-drawn” title card, has a little bit of juvenile humor (in this case, some semi-gruesome slapstick), and then has an even more childish resolution that serves as the punch line. At first glance, it’s pretty funny – relatively stupid, but funny. My family and I thought it was funny because we thought that Andy came up with it with his 15-year old self.

Now watch the clip again – but actively keep in mind that this was a man who was almost 30 at the time he was filmed. At least for my family, the “funny” was gone, and only the “stupid” was left. Once our assumption about his age proved false, it wasn’t “real” anymore, and we didn’t laugh anymore. I remember feeling almost deceived. Even David Segal, who wrote the article I linked earlier, admits, “Part of the joy of his shtick is the assumption that it springs from the addled mind of a rambunctious high school sophomore.”

To Segal, that meant his age didn’t matter for the comedian to be funny, but to me and my family, it meant that the Andy Milonakis Show was no longer watched.