Demetri Martin has always seemed to be carving out his own path in comedy. Though his style of quick, absurd jokes puts him in the lineage of Steven Wright, Mitch Hedberg and Todd Barry, his varied career – a 2003 Perrier win in Edinburgh, a turn in Ang Lee’s film Taking Woodstock, a book of his own drawings entitled Point Your Face at This – gives him the aura of being slightly above the comedic trends and cool-kid cliques. His Saturday night show at Town Hall was proof that he remains a consistently funny and immensely clever performer who has perfected his voice.
While Martin’s old shows involved a certain degree of fanfare, often featuring elaborately drawn gags on a large pad, he now mostly sticks to straight standup. His jokes are short but developed, tending more towards observations than wordplay.
There are some thematic chunks – like his hyper-literal scrutiny of signs like “bridge may be icy” and “beware of dog” – while other runs of jokes flow through loose word association. With a notebook on stage, it’s clear some of the material is still in the experimental phase, while standards from old specials pop up too – absurdist non sequiturs tend to be evergreen.
In the show’s only stylistic deviation, he ends his hour with a guitar and a harmonica, packing all of his true one-liners (“I want to see a snake eat spaghetti”) into this final section. It’s a tried-and-true technique for telling short jokes, as the musical accompaniment provides a false sense of movement to obscure the lack of transitions. And for whatever reason – perhaps the physical barrier of the instrument, or the audience’s willingness to take songs less literally than spoken word – the musical framework lets a comic push into edgier material, allowing the completely inoffensive Martin to play with sex and religion.
It’s clear that he is an exceptionally reliable comedian, with finely crafted material that allows for his unshowy, medium-energy performance style. When he stumbles over the wording of a joke, a flash of energy and personality shines through as he comments on his error and debates whether to move on or attempt it again. It shows up again when he flubs the word succeed, leading to a self-deprecating tangent about his own perceived lack of success.
For a moment, it’s hard not to wonder whether he’s bored with this shtick that he does so well. But if he is, it’s a testament to both his skills as a writer and the wisdom of his presentation that he still puts on an incredibly entertaining show.
