Final Clarification and Conclusion

For my last post on here, I would like to return to the subject that started it, Andy Milonakis, and the subject I highlighted in contrast, Toby Jones. In my second blog post, I mentioned that the reason I thought Jones still held water while Milonakis ceased being funny was because Toby Jones was just a character used to promote the humorous businesses. It’s been pointed out to me that Milonakis is just as much a character, so that argument doesn’t really hold. I would like to clarify.

vs.

It is certainly true that Andy Milonakis, for the "Andy Milonakis Show" at least, was a character that Milonakis created to be funny. But there is a fundamental difference between the humor created by Milonakis and the humor created by Robert Hines (“Jones”).

Andy Milonakis’s show was based on the fact that it seemed like an adolescent boy was writing and producing it. The humor was not sophisticated, and in many cases it was legitimately bad. But when I thought that a kid was making it, it took a certain level of intelligence that I respected. I laughed because it was funny in the context of the televised musings of a boy who somehow made it onto MTV. Once that context was taken away, the humor was stripped of its shield and went back to being unsophisticated or bad.

The Toby Jones videos, on the other hand, were not based on the fact that Toby Jones had to be a real person. The real humor was in his delivery, in his script, and in his ridiculous businesses. I laughed at the commercials themselves, not just because I thought Jones had produced them. When the context was taken away, and I found out that Toby Jones was really Hines, it didn’t really make a difference because the delivery and the editing were still just as funny.

It is from these two examples that I have generated a conclusion about this type of humor. In the case where humor is based primarily on the belief that an imaginary character is real, if the character is discovered to be fake, the case stops being funny. If, on the other hand, the humor is based on something other than the imaginary character’s perceived existence, it doesn’t really matter if the character is discovered to be false.