TelevisionSanjay & Craig
WRITER Adam Cimino
With the steadfast goal of making friends laugh, Jay Howell has established a name for himself throughout the often overlapping worlds of art, music and skateboarding. In doing so, he has perfected the ability to deliver a crude humour of sex and violence, coupled with moments of sincere introspection through a cast of pen-drawn gangly characters, awash in day-glo mise-en-scène. Howell’s ability to communicate a fart joke just as well as mankind’s existential horizons was quickly amplified through his collaboration with Jim Dirschberger, on the web series Forest City Rockers. As the duo honed their workflow, Howell began to learn the ropes of network television by designing characters for Fox’s Bob’s Burgers. The pair soon moved their shop to Los Angeles where they were joined by Andreas Trolf to begin work on Nickelodeon’s Sanjay & Craig. Holding down a primetime Saturday morning slot, the team has quickly developed characters loosely based off an old staple-bound zine Howell produced in the early 2000s. Now approaching the halfway mark of their first season, the boy and his pet snake have quickly established a warped routine of palm-to-forehead disasters to be resolved by ironic silver lining moments. These hijinks have included tightrope walking a trash filled above ground pool, speed eating hot wings to impress babes, and being stranded on a ‘Traffical Island’ while pretending to order hot wings to impress babes.
