Internet show ‘Greg & Donny’ takes affectionate look at Yinzers
Even if you don’t know “Greg & Donny,” you probably know people like Greg and Donny.
They’re an affectionate homage to a certain species of the Western Pennsylvania Yinzer in all its natural glory — two charmingly provincial dudes from Johnstown confronting our high-tech, ultra-connected world on their own terms.
The hit online comedy-shorts series “Greg & Donny” ( greganddonny.com ) revolves around the cranky, perpetually annoyed Greg and his oblivious pal and neighbor Donny. Together, they discover video chat, Farmville on Facebook, “LOLcats” and other Internet-enabled ephemera. And they grapple with the philosophical problems presented by things like hummus and the Snuggie.
Plus, it’s got goofy accents. People love goofy accents.
“Greg & Donny” won the “Out of the Box Award” at the 2010 New York Television Festival in September, and picked up a development deal with IFC, the Independent Film Channel. At the moment, the show can be characterized as “in development.”
In the episode helpfully titled “Accent,” Greg calls home via video chat from a conference, dismayed at his treatment by East Coast colleagues — “Dey say I got dat Pixburgh accent.”
His wife, Gina is irate (as usual) — “Where are dese people makin’ fun of you from, Merry Old England?'”
Writer-actors Jeff Skowron (Greg) and Matt Yeager (Donny) moved to New York City to pursue their dreams in the entertainment business — only to have their most successful project humorously reflect life in their hometown of Johnstown.
“It’s highly argumentative,” says Yeager of the characters. “They’re all kind of one big family. Everyone always has something to teach the others — whether they actually do or not. “Greg has a job and a wife — he’s a little bit more grounded. He has his own sense of justice, and doesn’t like to be told what to do with his property and stuff like that. Donny is the best-friend character with no job. He sort of seems like a bad influence, but he’s all right when you get right down to it.”
The idea for the series began after Yeager and Skowron worked on another moderately successful Internet comedy series called “The Burg” — not about Pittsburgh, but a satire of the hipster scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“Doing ‘The Burg’ made us realize that we could do our own show — that it was not that difficult,” says Yeager. “We started coming up with sketches, shot and edited a few things on our own.
“Then, one night, we decided it would really be funny to do a show about Johnstown. Jeff and I have been friends since we were kids, and kind of always did the accent, and had these characters that we would do for each other.”
Compared to television, assembling a show and putting it online costs next to nothing.
“Initially, the goal was to try to pitch it as a half-hour pilot,” says Yeager. “We were talking to a producer at one time about the show, and then we realized that the script may take some time to get acclimated to, because it was written in the (Pittsburghese) dialect. So we decided that we should shoot something for them to see.
“We came up with the idea that these two guys discover video chat. Jeff and I were on opposite sides of the country at the time. We just wrote a quick script, shot it on either end, and cut it all together. We posted it on Youtube, because we thought it was funny. It ended up not going anywhere with the producer, but that video ended up being far more popular than anything we had done (online).”
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the show work, like Greg’s finely tuned sense of exasperation — even his mustache seems to get annoyed with Donny. Then again, many of the funniest episodes work simply because Greg’s wife, Gina, shows up.
“Gina is a loudmouth force of nature,” says Yeager. “(The actress) Kim Cea is from Carnegie. I did a play with her in 2004 in New York, and we found out that we were both from Pittsburgh. She’s an actress and standup comedian in New York.”
So far, the response to “Greg & Donny” online has been entirely positive. Though the characters are fairly goofy caricatures, they’re likable and the show never looks down on them. “Matt and I love where we grew up,” says Skowron. “Doing this is such a pleasure. The stupid things the characters do — that’s just the characters we wrote. We hope no one thinks we’re making fun of anything peculiar to Western Pa.”
Adds Yeager: “We’ve always operated under the assumption that as long as we didn’t write the show in a mean spirit, it wouldn’t be interpreted in that way.”
