Slouching toward success

IN a generation of hyper-achieving corporate drones, Greg Harrell-Edge is a bracing port in a Type-A storm.

While his contemporaries scurried from internship to 401(k) plan, Harrell-Edge hit San Diego’s Pacific Beach every day and played online poker for his milk money. While a certain reporter hunched over her computer for hours on end, this friend from high school would call to settle a bet about the definitions of words.

Meet the laziest person in America.

So skilled is Harrell-Edge at artful loafing that the grinning 6-foot-8-inch former college basketball player has achieved the ultimate slacker dream: He has parlayed his love of leisure into a bona fide, real-life, paying job.

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel bestowed the title -- and accompanying position -- upon him this summer, plucking him out of 10,000 contestants nationwide on late-night network TV in front of more than a million viewers.

And what demands will his new boss put on Harrell-Edge? What will his new job entail?

“It’s watching television. Everybody knows how to do it,” Kimmel says by phone, but “only a few can do it professionally -- only the finest.” Harrell-Edge’s, well, edge over the competition, says Kimmel, was that “he just seems like a character.”

Floating through life buoyed by the dumb luck and boundless enthusiasm befitting Cosmo Kramer, the 24-year-old Vienna, Va., native is living the lazy man’s dream.

“Every step that he makes is in the direction of being happy for the moment,” says friend Derek Moore, 24, who is toiling -- a little ruefully -- in law school at the University of Virginia. “He is admirably carefree.”

That’s what inspired another friend to urge Harrell-Edge to enter the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” competition in April. The ABC chat show had a vacancy in one of its three television-watcher jobs and cast its net across the country to fill it. Harrell-Edge absent-mindedly pecked out the brief application form online (pitch line: “You can earn big bucks in the high-growth, fast-paced world of watching TV”) and didn’t think much of it.

Turns out there’s a little more to the job than meets the eye. It involves scanning an endless parade of Tivo-ed morning shows, celebrity gossip programs and reality TV to find choice morsels of ridiculousness that comedian Kimmel can riff on during his opening monologue.

The watchers work with editors to splice the clips to maximize punch lines, and they pitch their ideas -- occasionally with sample jokes or funny bits -- to Kimmel and the writers before each show.

Still, one guy works from a beanbag chair, and Harrell-Edge often slurps down cereal as he catches up on the exploits of those beautifully bored teenagers of MTV’s “Laguna Beach” -- not exactly manual labor.

“It’s an important service to America,” Kimmel says, before adding that the TV watchers “seem pretty lazy, to be honest with you.”

In May, freshly back from a jaunt to Thailand (where he wrote an as-yet unpublished gambling adventure novel), Harrell-Edge returned to the dismal prospect of finding a job. The man has strongly held principles when it comes to work: Waking up to an alarm is a hardship people “shouldn’t have to needlessly subject themselves to.” And heading to work in the rain? Forget it.

Sharon Harrell, Harrell-Edge’s mother, says her son “felt that people bought too much of that Puritan Protestant work ethic -- hook, line and sinker.”

Amid fruitless nights searching Monster.com, the situation looked bleak.

“Within a week I might be a paralegal who’s spending 60 hours a week making copies for some tool,” Harrell-Edge, who earned a degree in politics from the University of Virginia, recalls thinking a couple of months ago. “This might be the end of the road ... where real life kicks in. I need something to come out of nowhere, pop up and save me from this.”

Sure enough, that’s when the folks at “Kimmel” called.

“His sense of humor, it absolutely stood out from the very beginning,” says supervising producer Erin Irwin, who headed the show’s search. “I was rooting for Greg the whole time.”

The right resume

HE certainly had the lazy credentials: For an entire year at school, Harrell-Edge slept on a mat on the floor, with a bare lightbulb overhead and an old towel draped across the window -- because he didn’t feel like decorating. His friends termed it the “Trainspotting” room. Plus, Lebowski-like, he was the only finalist who showed up to audition in a T-shirt and khakis rather than a suit.

And he had the off-kilter sensibility: Harrell-Edge and his buddies established a made-up holiday, National High Five Day (the third Thursday in April), and promote it to anyone who will listen. (Kimmel even mentioned it once on the show.)

“He’s just constantly coming up with ridiculous things to do,” says friend Katy Young, 22, a financial analyst in Washington, D.C. Like the time they drove from Blacksburg, Va., to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in the middle of the night for kicks, stumbling upon Dolly Parton wannabes auditioning for the theme park’s stage show.

Harrell-Edge’s “whatever” attitude carried him through two rounds of auditions for the couch potato post, including one on-camera screen test with Kimmel.

The host “instantly clicked with him,” Irwin says. “You couldn’t have scripted it better.”

Harrell-Edge quickly charmed Kimmel and his TV cohorts, real-life Uncle Frank and Cousin Sal, who bonded with him over frequenting the PacificPoker.com website. And Harrell-Edge is a fan of the legendary early ‘90s basketball squad from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, which Kimmel loved from his year at school there.

“He’s interested in sports, and he seems to have a gambling problem,” Kimmel says of what distinguished Harrell-Edge from the pack.

Pretty soon, the guys were chatting like old pals, eating up Harrell-Edge’s tale of a “fat contest” staged with a friend to see who could put on the most weight in a month. (Harrell-Edge won, swelling from 202 pounds to 237.)

Then, with the four finalists backstage, Kimmel revealed Harrell-Edge’s victory on the air June 23.

“My mother said she was walking around work all day the day after the contest going, ‘Greg’s got a job, Greg’s got a job, Greg’s got a job,’ ” says Harrell-Edge, who rolls out of bed now at 8:30 a.m. to walk the three blocks from his Hollywood apartment to the studio. “She was really pumped up about it.”

“Who thinks their child is going to be the laziest person in the world?” asks Sharon Harrell, a psychologist in northern Virginia. “This is not something that you’re, like, aspiring to.” But, she admits, a job is a job. “I think it’s hilarious,” she says.

An underdog hero for the army of twentysomething working stiffs out there, Harrell-Edge is “vindication for all of those who were told that if you don’t study you’re not going to make it,” says friend Dave Penndorf, 24, a waiter and ski lift operator in Squaw Valley.

But the laziest man in America doesn’t think of himself in quite those terms. A creative soul, perhaps misunderstood, he prefers “efficient.”

“I’ve never felt that I was particularly lazy,” says Harrell-Edge, who found himself being recognized on Hollywood Boulevard several weeks ago. But the effort he expends is “so close to zero, I can understand how it might be misinterpreted for lazy.”

The poker player, novelist and master of “efficiency” now spends his workdays -- watching Regis and Kelly, Kimora Lee Simmons and the cast of “The Surreal Life” -- a lot like he spends his life: waiting for the next crazy thing to come along.