Andy Milonakis: Real Talk

T

he opening theme to the Andy Milonakis Show with the show’s namesake spitting such balderdash as, “I got peas on my head but don’t call me a pea-head, bees on my head but don’t call me a bee-head,” isn’t very convincing of a b-boy. But Fat Joe, Lil’ Jon, the Ying Yang Twins, and Andy’s many other guests would tell you otherwise.

Andy’s off-brand sense of humor may have you believing he’s also a little detached from reality, but Andy makes no apologies for who he is; shocking people with his outrageously off the cuff humor is the bane of Andy’s existence. Executive Produced by Jimmy Kimmel, the show is a crazy composition of wild sketches that have you shaking your head at the television in utter confusion. Whether he’s harassing people on the street with his ballsy prodding, or having his mind taken over by a bottle of conditioner, Andy pushes the envelope and he doesn’t have a problem laughing at himself. Though it’s different, it’s a popular guilty pleasure. What’s more is, it may be influenced by Hip-Hop.

As Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and Juelz Santana join Andy this coming season – premiering 3/31, the premium season is released on DVD 3/28. In celebration of both events, Andy Milonakis got down with AllHipHop.com, on some – believe it or not – real talk.

AllHipHop.com: Based upon all the speculation, I have to start by asking, how old are you?

Andy Milonakis: 62.

AllHipHop.com: Yeah? You look good for 62, what do you take?

Andy Milonakis: I smoke a lot of crack.

AllHipHop.com: Well I guess it works better for you than others, crack is wack. But seriously, you’re not going to tell me how old you are?

Andy Milonakis: Nah.

AllHipHop.com: So you just want everyone to think you’re a 30-year-old pretending to be 15?

Andy Milonakis: I want people to believe whatever they want.

AllHipHop.com: Your sense of humor is borderline schitzo, but you’re a funny dude. I’m not sure if there’s a method to your madness but how did your show come about?

Andy Milonakis: I had really weird videos online that I did on my own time and I had this video camera so I thought I’d start creating stupid videos for the Internet. So I did that, and I had a little section of a website for like three years. Every week, I’d put a new one up and all of a sudden after a long time, one of em just caught on and started to circulate all over he internet and got like a million hits and radio stations started calling me. Then Jimmy Kimmel found it, and contacted me and basically he had me make a video tape to like audition for his show, and I sent it in they liked it so they started hiring me to be a correspondent. I still lived in New York, so they’d give me an airplane ticket and say, “Hey, you’re going to Florida to do a Spring Break piece,” and they started sending me all over and it was very surreal, it was nuts. It was even weirder because I had never met cats. I’m still in my apartment in New York. and they just email me and then all of a sudden they’re buying me tickets over the phone and sending me places. I felt like the Charlie’s Angel guy [Charlie], like, “You’re going here, here’s your mission”.

AllHipHop.com: Prior to that, did you have a desire to be on television?

Andy Milonakis: A little bit, but I never had enough desire to want to go out to Los Angeles. I don’t know, it just seemed so out of reach. I just never had it in me to do it, so I’m kinda lucky I fell into it.

AllHipHop.com: So how did that affect your schooling? Did you have to quit?

Andy Milonakis: Yeah, I had to quit [laughing], sneaky.

AllHipHop.com: I had to try. So how do all these big Hip-Hop stars know this “kid” who runs a show from his apartment in New York?

Andy Milonakis: I got props, yo!

AllHipHop.com: [laughing] Tell me about your Hip-Hop affiliations…

Andy Milonakis: They don’t all really know me. Some of them do, but I’ve been a Hip-Hop head forever. So when it turned out that we were gonna start getting celebrity guests for every show, I wanted rap guys from the get-go. I just thought that even though not every body is Hip-Hop [on the show], about 80 percent are. I just think that it’s such a weird wacky comedy-based world, and then you bring in those rappers who are typically all about money, cars and girls and we put them in these wacky situations, and we don’t really treat them like celebrities. Like Lil’ Jon was the first, and instead of treating him like Lil’ Jon with the girls and stuff, we just had him doing some stupid s**t with me so we just like the contrast of taking these rap guys and putting them in wacky situations.

AllHipHop.com: And they were comfortable with that?

Andy Milonakis: Uh, most of them were.

AllHipHop.com: Who wasn’t?

Andy Milonakis: The Ying Yang Twins weren’t really feeling it.

AllHipHop.com: I would have thought somebody like Fat Joe would’ve had more of a problem than Ying Yang.

Andy Milonakis: Fat Joe had no problem at all. Snoop put a f**king pancake on his face, and off-camera, we were singing s**t together. He was cool as hell. Even Juelz Santana, who we did this year, was cool. He did this s**t where I got caught in a bear trap and I had to do the “Whistle Song,” and he came to my rescue.

AllHipHop.com: That’s sounds funny. Do you come up with all the skits?

Andy Milonakis: Not all of them, there are a few other writers I work with, and we each write our own stuff and sometimes, we finish each others endings and stuff.

AllHipHop.com: Being that your show isn’t a sitcom or reality TV, how do you describe it?

Andy Milonakis: I would say it’s intensely bad public access television.

AllHipHop.com: So is that your intention – to make it as wack as possible?

Andy Milonakis: Actually, yeah. Some of the kids don’t get that level of it. They just see it’s wacky, and they like that. But part of the stuff I love is the stuff that’s bad. When I’m acting in it, I sometimes purposely act horribly because it’s comedy and I think with comedy, you can do that.

AllHipHop.com: Who haven’t you had that you’d like on the show?

Andy Milonakis: I’d like to get anyone from WuTang. I love them. I got to do one with Method Man for Jimmy Kimmel, but it never got on the air.

AllHipHop.com: Why not?

Andy Milonakis: Sometimes things get cancelled. He did a hidden camera bit, and it’s a long story. But Method Man is cool. I’ve met him a couple times, and I’d like to have him on the show. I’d like to have some Reggae dudes, too. I mean, they’re not as popular over here, but I listen to Reggae about as much as I listen to Hip-Hop.

AllHipHop.com: Would you call yourself a rapper?

Andy Milonakis: Yeah, I mean I do it as a joke and the raps that I write in real life are definitely for comedy. But they’re much dirtier than what I do on the show, they’re not as bubble gum.

Andy Milonakis: Dirtier? If you’re supposed to be a kid, why are you doing dirty raps?

Andy Milonakis: Kids are dirty motherf**kers themselves.

AllHipHop.com: Nonetheless, is your comedy more for kids or adults?

Andy Milonakis: The show is like anywhere from eight to 25. I don’t know too many people over 30 who like it, but I definitely have some middle-aged people who tell me they watch the show, but I defiantly think it’s for a younger audience. Some of he stuff I used to do before I got the show was for an older audience.

AllHipHop.com: Does it bother you when people don’t like it?

Andy Milonakis: No, it doesn’t bother me. I kinda like that people don’t like it.

AllHipHop.com: You’re crazy, you do know you’re a little off, right?

Andy Milonakis: You mean off in the head?

AllHipHop.com: Yes, I say that respectfully, of course.

Andy Milonakis: I just think if everybody liked it. It would be good because it’s the super mainstream comedy I think is awful.

AllHipHop.com: What do you like in Hip-Hop right now, and being from New York what do you think New York can do to bring it back to the East?

Andy Milonakis: My main problem with Hip-Hop is when people in the streets are rapping about real s**t, and then when they blow up, suddenly their music changes, and they start talking about the ‘money cars hoes’ thing. It just kinda goes down the drain. Part of it isn’t their fault, because their lifestyle changes, but the real s**t in the streets doesn’t change. I’m not gonna hate on all that stuff that’s all about bling and all that, ‘cause some of that s**t is catchy and cool to dance to, but there’s two categories to me: the Hip-Hop I want to dance to when I’m at a club, and Hip-Hop I want to listen to when I’m not at a club that I think is great music.

AllHipHop.com: Who’s your favorite rapper?

Andy Milonakis: My favorite rapper is Big L. That guy is so amazing to me. I think more rappers just need to rap about real life, and maybe when they blow up and they make millions of dollars, maybe they shouldn’t be so quick to talk about that rich lifestyle because really that rich lifestyle doesn’t make for interesting. Maybe they have other issues in their lives that they can talk about. When you talk about stuff that 80 percent of other rappers are talking about, you’re just being generic. You should realize that.

AllHipHop.com: What is it that you love about Big L?

Andy Milonakis: I mean, I’m from New York. I like East Coast Hip-Hop, and that cat is from Harlem. He has funny punchlines he talks about real life. I just like straight up ghetto beats – like thug rap, not posing.

AllHipHop.com: Talk to me about growing up in New York. Certainly, on the show, you don’t seem as someone who keeps it hood…

Andy Milonakis: You know, I’m not going to sit here and say I’m from some scary place. I never feared for my life or nothing, but I hung out with plenty of thugs. One of my best friends got busted for selling crack.

AllHipHop.com: To you?

Andy Milonakis: [laughs] No, they used to put crack in tennis balls, and bounce ‘em over to people’s houses. It’s crazy ‘cause nobody believes me, ‘cause I grew up in Westchester County, which is 30 miles north of the city – a dope area, like really rich, and you don’t have to worry about someone putting a gun to your neck. But where I grew up, it was like this big Hip-Hop community. It was a complex, and everybody there was into Hip-Hop. There was crackheads selling me records at my door at three o’clock in the morning. [One time] he sold me three crates of records for like six dollars and there was so many good records in there, old Run-DMC, Kool Moe Dee – a gold mine.

AllHipHop.com: Hearing these things are interesting, because you don’t come off like you just exploit hip-hop for the sake of your show; it’s really a part of who you are.

Andy Milonakis: Definitely. I’ve been into it my whole life, but it’s different from the White kids who ‘dress the part,’ and their slang is obviously fake and all that. When these kids pose, it sounds so fake when every other word is like, “Yo, yo yo, and knowhutimsayin?” I might say some s**t when I’m around my boys and stuff, but I hate the ones who gave White kids who listen to rap a bad name.