A.D. Miles

Once upon a time, stand-up was a comedian's surest route to television work, while a later generation went from long-form improv troupes like Second City or the Upright Citizens Brigade into TV sketch comedy. But in the post-YouTube world, a new generation of comedians ditched live audiences entirely, honing their comic sensibilities using cheap and easy-to-operate digital technology and posting the results online. Writer, actor and director A.D. Miles was one of the first to take this path to a wide television audience when he became the head writer of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" in 2009.

Anthony David Miles was born in North Carolina in 1971. He first attended North Carolina State University at Raleigh as a Business major, but switched to Communications after a heart-to-heart talk with one of his professors led him to realize that he really wanted to work in film and television. After graduating in 1992, he moved to New York with a fellow NCSU alum, fledging actor and comedian Zach Galifianakis. They were roommates for four years, until Galifianakis moved to Los Angeles.

During these early struggling years, Miles was able to put his experience as a Business major to good use, working an office job for the video production company that made the popular "Buns of Steel" series of home workout cassettes. That gig later inspired a number of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" sketches spoofing the awkward, wooden acting and lo-tech computer animation of old-school instructional videos.

In 1996, Miles wrote, directed and starred in "Ray Has Sex," a parody of 1950s classroom instructional films. Though little seen at the time, it did land him an agent, and MTV liked the four-minute film enough to expand it into a half-hour pilot, "This Is Ray" (1997). The pilot wasn't picked up, but Miles soon found small roles in films including Spike Lee's racial satire "Bamboozled" (also featuring members of The Roots, with whom Miles would work closely on "Late Night") and the cult-favorite period piece "Wet Hot American Summer" (2001).

The director and writer of the latter film, David Wain and Michael Showalter, respectively, went on to hire Miles for several of their other projects, including Showalter's directing debut, "The Baxter" (2005), Wain's Ten Commandments-inspired "The Ten" (2007) and web series "Wainy Days" (2007-09), as well as guest appearances on their surreal sketch series "Stella" (Comedy Central 2005).

With his skinny frame, red hair and soft Southern accent, Miles was a natural to play awkward, nerdy roles, a niche he filled on TV shows ranging from the reality-show parody "Reno 911!" (Comedy Central 2003-09) to the procedural "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" (NBC 2001-2011). Miles reunited with his old roommate Galifianakis to co-star opposite Upright Citizens Brigade founder Matt Walsh in the local-news parody "Dog Bites Man" (Comedy Central 2006), in which the cast interacted with people who were unaware that they weren't a real TV news crew.

After this short-lived show, Miles began writing his own series of web shorts: a soap-opera parody called "Horrible People" (2008) starring Kristen Schaal and Mather Zickel as an annoying rich couple. This was followed by "Hot Sluts" (2009), starring Alison Brie in an over-the-top depiction of trashy nightclub life.

In 2009, Miles became the head writer of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" (NBC 2009-2014), stamping the series with his own particular comic sensibility. In addition to supervising the writing of sketches and videotaped comedy pieces, he appeared regularly on camera. His appearances included the recurring "7th Floor West" sketches -- a parody of "The Hills" (MTV 2006-2010) in which Miles played a passive-aggressive version of himself determined to humiliate Fallon -- and "The Real Housewives of Late Night," co-starring Miles as his (fictional) wife Dale, a humorless, tightly-wound prig aghast at the excesses of her fellow housewives.