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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Comedy Spotting

Being the second post of Now That's Comedy I decided to start off with my FIRST comedian feature. When I feature a comedian I'll try to write something a little interesting on his/her style and where you can see/hear some performance. Demetri Martin gets the honour of being the first featured comedian because, well, my roommate said so.

I was introduced to Demetri Martin on The Daily Show via his Trendspotting segments. His quirky sense of humour and delivery earned him a returning role on The Daily Show and in my ... heart. So! I obtained his comedy album These are Jokes and didn't delete it after a run through. The album is a live show bookended with some studio songs that are actually not immediately skippable. After listening to the performance I often enjoy Demetri's song on grapes. They are so delicious.

What Demetri does right is his delivery. His jokes are admirable in their simplicity but his delivery adds an almost childlike whimsy and sense of discovery to the material that moves a joke on sweater vests into the joke my sister will demand anytime any semblance of the topic is broached. Along with his delivery Demetri also knows how to punctuate his jokes with both music and graphics. Some of my favourite bits involve one of those paper standy-jobs our elementary profs used to make long brainstormed lists of what type of animals in the sea we could do our projects on. And who doesn't like a joke that utilizes a pie chart? I'll toss out the word multimodal here because I know some of you cats like that sort of thing.

Check out his videos on Comedy Central (though I have no idea where you could find them).

See ya soon.

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