Another short post: I rarely watch stand-up. I catch snippets on Comedy Central, and remember why. I rent a very rare concert film, like Sarah Silverman’s, which is actually pretty good, and I’m still kind of underimpressed. It’s not a genre that intrigues me–it’s like 70% miss and 30% hit and completely formally uninteresting to boot.
But two recent viewings beat the percentages. Demetri Martin’s standup “Person” is not on dvd, but you can catch most of it on youtube. He’s odd, and his ratio of hits to misses is closer to 65-70 to 35-30, and he tries out a few interesting variations that make the act something a bit more involving, too. His shtick: he looks like he’s 10, and he’s one seriously silly person. My favorite bit involves a large pad with graphs/charts for comedy.
But even better–and a lot odder (in the form of the dvd, which has both stand-up and various filmed bits that aren’t sketches but are not exactly backstage chatter either)–is Zach Galifianakis’ Live at the Purple Onion. His jokes don’t always work, but he delivers them with such strangeness, you get the sense that half of his material is being born on the spot. He’s really intense, and then he’ll pull back for an exceedingly silly self-deprecatory chatter on the stage. I’d even say that I get the sense that the filming of the dvd gives us a skewed, inferior vision of his abilities–he gets a bit caught up in the camera, and while funny I have this feeling he’d be even stronger live. Favorite bit: he has a running series of gags about characters he’s developing. One is the Timid Pimp, and that had me laughing for about five minutes.