Who: Adam Pally, 29

What: As Max, the manic gay perma-slob on ABC's perfectly smart and silly six-friends-in-the-city sitcom Happy Endings, Pally earns every laugh. See: Max downing a meatball sub shirtless to disenchant an infatuated female friend. But, faced with his scruffy, blue-eyed everydude charm, we -- and the show's doubling viewership -- are more enamored than ever. (As are the gay fans who wrote his wife via Facebook, requesting shirtless photos of Pally. "Things can get creepy on the Internet.")

On being compared to that other sitcom sextet: Though he once joked to Craig Ferguson that the difference between Happy Endings and Friends is that "there's a black guy in our cast" (take a bow, Damon Wayans Jr.), Pally welcomes the parallels. "It ran for forever, and they all got super rich," he says now. "What would be bad about ending up like Friends?"

On developing a thick skin: "My cousins and I put on a family talent show every Hanukkah. When I was five, I did stand-up and bombed. My parents" -- themselves then actors with a traveling musical act called Pally and Pal -- "made it a point not to give me courtesy laughs. They were like, 'He's going to have to learn!'"

On ignoring Chevy Chase's advice: In the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe, Pally performed with comedy idols including the famously biting Chevy Chase, who once slapped comedian (and Pally's friend) Rob Huebel for introducing himself. "I left unscathed," says Pally, "but I ran into Chevy a couple months later, and he remembered me and said, 'If I were you, I'd quit. It's not going to happen.' And I said... 'Thank you for remembering me!'"