Who's the Comedian?

"Uh," says Milonakis, feigning deep unease. "I don't feel comfortable telling you that. Can you ask me the next question?"

Other bits are just Milonakis in his apartment, dreaming up pranks with an assist from various oddballs, none of them professional actors, who seem to have shuffled in from David Lynch's "Twin Peaks." In one, Milonakis drapes a sash that reads "Coupon" on a gray-haired woman, then sics her on a Chinese-food deliveryman. "Coupon, coupon," she intones, robotically moving toward the door. Deliveryman retreats, totally freaked out.

Not all of this works, and some of it falls flat or seems to be the kind of thing you'd need mind-expanding drugs to grasp. Like the skit where Milonakis pretends to tearfully grieve for a slice of lunch meat he has named "Dr. Curly." That's just perplexing. But when it's funny, the comedy is somehow both childish and darkly subversive. Which is to say the humor is as singular as Milonakis.

He was raised in Westchester County and has one sister, who is older. In high school, looking younger than his classmates could have been a huge liability, but his mother never heard him complain about it.

"He was a really outgoing kid," says Kathleen Milonakis. "Always wanted to go to parties, had a lot of friends."

If there was a joke to be made about his appearance, Milonakis made it before anyone else. "Humor is a great defense mechanism," he says. "If you're a serious, fat, young-looking kid, you're not going to be the most popular guy in high school." Growing up, he watched others tortured psychologically by peers, but says it never happened to him. "Self-deprecation is an awesome way to steal people's thunder. You make fun of yourself, people like you."

Studying the guts of computers had been a passion for a while, and after high school, when the Internet boom arrived, he found a way to marry his geekdom to his inner ham. When he wasn't at that tech support job at the accounting firm, he posted video vignettes, shot by himself at home, to AngryNakedPat.com, a site started by a friend.

"It was a dumb hobby," he recalls. "We had a fan base of like 500 people and a message board, so like 10 or 15 people would write to say what they thought about it. And I was fine with that."

By 2002, he'd made dozens of these little films, and he was ready to try something else, something more immediate and public. He started taking classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv theater with a pretty extensive comedy curriculum. The morning he filmed "Super Bowl," the day of the game, Jan. 26, 2003, he hadn't made a video in weeks. At first he felt rusty.

"When I first started singing it, I wasn't doing it with energy," he recalls. "But you've got to sell it. So I just went crazy."

He snipped two minutes out of the video -- the original is six minutes long -- posted it and didn't think about it again. A few weeks went by and someone e-mailed to say, surprise, the song is all over the Internet. He checked the counter that tabulates hits to AngryNakedPat and discovered that 4,000 visitors had downloaded "Super Bowl" that day. The next day it was 8,000. Then it doubled and doubled, until the hits reached 100,000 in a single 24-hour span.

"The server company charged us like $3,000 because we went over our bandwidth," he recalls.