While they may look alike and claim to have been spawned by the same father, the creators of JoeyandDavid.com are not actually twins. Originally hailing from Munster, Indiana, Joey Mandarino and David Young have stayed close throughout their college years, winding up at the Tisch School of Arts at NYU and Syracuse University, respectively. After having graduated with a degree in TV, radio, and film, David now works as an assistant on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” while Joey performs with the NYU sketch comedy troupe, “The Back of the Line.” Both at home in Indiana and in NYC, the two collaborate to shoot, edit, and punctually post episodes for JoeyandDavid.com every month.
Supplemented by shorter sketches, Joey and David’s longer episodes range from five to twenty minutes in length and poke fun at a variety of pop-cultural phenomena, from instant baking instructions to adopt-a-child campaigns. The longer, well-developed episodes are often centered on the two pretty boys’ tumultuous domestic relationship. Their moods change with the wind, their fights are never less that catastrophic, but the boys always hold it down in the end, kind of like a sitcom about ADHD college kids who have had too much to drink. For their shorts, Joey and Dave rip off several of television’s most obnoxious ad campaigns. In one, the duo substitutes an otherwise banal product with a femenine hygiene product, and in another, they stage an upbeat Coke jingle during a funeral.
Nana Knows Best opens with the pair out on the town, searching for a date. These losers-at-the-game (think A Night at the Roxbury) embark on a quest to find Joey a date. After a long search, the pair finally finds a few women willing to talk to the forlorn and lonely men, but let’s just say Joey’s tactics fall far short of chivalry. Eventually turning to the short’s proverbial namesake, Joey ends up confiding all of his problems in David’s grandmother one sunny afternoon on a rooftop in New York City. After hearing out her sage advice, Joey takes his respect for the woman all too literally (think “Mrs. Doubtfire”).
