“What Peter’s done,” Stern says, “by virtue of his own enthusiasm, is to collect people with a similarly high level of enthusiasm and put us all in this very collaborative, collegial environment. It’s partly about earning a living, but it’s also about validation and just keeping people moving ahead, being funny.”

Principato told me he has three big problems in life: parking, the declining number of jobs for his clients and his weight. One night, around 9 p.m., I visited him at his home in Sherman Oaks, just below Mulholland Drive. The house was a standard ranch, with little to distinguish it but a screening room with Sensurround sound and a fully functioning popcorn machine, complete with condiments. Principato wore an enormous bright yellow smiley-face T-shirt, black Pony sneakers and basketball shorts. He’d just finished working out to an exercise video starring Mitch Gaylord, the 1984 Olympic gymnast phenomenon. Gaylord’s workouts involve lunges, squats, core exercises, strength builders, fat burners and exercises utilizing two-, four- and six-pound exercise balls. “You can see why I joke with everyone that I’m working out with Mitch Gaylord’s balls,” Principato said.

Growing up on Long Island, Principato spent a lot of time with his grandfather, a former talent scout. Through him, Principato was drawn to the entertainment business, but his interest was not encouraged by the rest of the family. Comedy and television remained secondary to the goal of medical school. Eventually Principato recognized that while little effort could produce a 3.0 average, it required a 100 percent effort to get the 4.0 he needed. In the end, comedy won out. He’d always been on the funny side, he told me, but felt he didn’t have the “courage” (his word) to pursue a career as an actual comic. In time, he realized, he didn’t really care if it was himself or other people who provided the humor. “Just being close to it gives me some warmth.”

Principato flourished at the New York office of the William Morris Agency, where he made agent at the precocious age of 24. After seven years, he left to start a management division of Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video. As Principato put it, agents were encouraged to take a hands-off approach to their clients. Principato never figured out how to do that. Where other agents went home at night to their families, Principato stayed out with his clients, at comedy clubs, in backrooms, on tour, on the sets of movies and TV shows — even flying cross-country to bail them out of jail. Several of his clients speculated affectionately that they serve as Principato’s surrogate family. Referring to past clients like ex-girlfriends, he often uses the phrase “We were together,” as in, “We were together for X number of years.” When Jonah Hill left him recently to pursue his career without management, Principato told me three or four times how well he was taking it — before admitting that in fact, it had been one of the most painful events in his recent life and that he preferred not to discuss the subject any further.

Principato and his partner occasionally produce TV shows and movies; partly for this reason, they are often compared with the legendary comedy manager and producer Bernie Brillstein. Over five decades in business, Brillstein (who went on to form the firm Brillstein-Grey with his partner Brad Grey) had a hand in birthing and nurturing, as manager and producer, such creations as “Hee Haw,” “The Muppet Show,” “Saturday Night Live,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Ghostbusters,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “The Sopranos,” along with talent like Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Lorne Michaels and Jim Henson. No name in the comedy-management firmament has ever shone brighter than Brillstein’s, yet the gift of producer-managers like him is elusive. As Principato said, a carpenter builds and a doctor heals — what does a manager do?

“In the representation business,” Principato told me, “people fall into many categories, but I like to break it down into three. You have your servicers, who help the agents and set general meetings for clients. You have signers, who are really good at convincing prospective clients why you’re the right manager. And then you have the architects, who are good at looking into the future and being strategic about building someone’s career out.”

Two days before our visit to the Cartoon Network, I got to watch the architect in action. I sat in as Principato prepared the three young comics — Todd Fasen, Alex Berg and Alex Fernie — to pitch “Unexplained Phenomenons.” Principato had been watching their improv group, Convoy, for just over two years. He’d long sought a television vehicle to display their talents. “It wasn’t a genius move,” he told me, “but it was like, O.K, what about doing something where these guys make fun of the genre of shows, like, ‘The X-Files’ meets ‘The Night Stalker’ meets ‘Fringe,’ meets these kind of unexplained-phenomena shows?” He introduced them to the producer Jonathan Stern and to a director named Peter Atencio, fast becoming known for his stylistically spot-on, low-budget parodies. And then, well, here we were.