Demetri, I Hardly Knew Ye
As is so often the case with popular culture, I’m late to the party. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I just became aware of a comedian named Demetri Martin. (I hope that’s his real name. As you know, I find cross-national names like “Federico Hayashi” funny. But he’s a comedian, so he might have chosen that as a stage name to be funny. In which case, it isn’t funny any more. Martin would appreciate that sentiment.) He’s already appeared on Letterman and the Comedy Channel, written for Conan O’Brian, and held a regular spot on The Daily Show, but I’m just getting to him now.
His humor is very smart, and rapid-fire but soft-pedaled; there’s very little in the way of setup material, so he just goes directly from punchline to punchline, all in a tone that suggests he’s just hanging out and strumming his guitar—only by accident is he doing it up in front of a lot of people. Because of his delivery, I’d like to call his humor quirky, but I’m not sure the label applies, because he owes a lot to Steven Wright and George Carlin: humor built around self-negation and wordplay. The material is original, but the act as a whole is so much like these legends that Martin can’t properly be called quirky, if only because someone else got to that territory first. (He’d appreciate that sentiment, too.)
To show you what I mean, let me repeat three of his jokes, one that would make Wright proud, one that’s pure Carlin, and one that either one might have come up with:
“I want to make a jigsaw puzzle that's 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’”
“It’s weird how ‘finger puppet’ sounds okay as a noun.”
“She was amazing. I never met a woman like this before. She showed me to the dressing room. She said: ‘If you need anything, I’m Jill.’ I was like: ‘Oh, my God! I never met a woman before with a conditional identity. What if I don’t need anything? Who are you?’ ‘If you don’t need anything, I’m Eugene.’”
Martin’s humor is playful, built around the silly idea itself, pared down as finely as he can get it. I really enjoy that style of comedy, and it’s far better than the general run of stand-up, which is all too often dependent on insults, vulgarity, and general abrasiveness. Unfortunately, comedy careers in Martin’s vein tend to be short, because producing that much material is damnably hard. You can stretch a sit-com setup into a half hour, and you can harangue about the opposite sex or government or bad drivers indefinitely, but ideas nobody ever thought before are hard to find, and the laugh lasts only five seconds, even if you’re good. Fifteen, tops. So original stand-up comedians burn out fast, or, more often, move up to television and movies, where the work is easier and the pay better.
I bring this up because, according to Wikipedia, Martin is already working on three movies: Will, Moonpeople, and Kids in America, in various capacities of writer and actor, and is in line to replace Conan O’Brien when he leaves in 2009. Bummer. I only found this great stand-up comedian four days ago, and his career as a stand-up comedian is already over. (Martin would appreciate that sentiment, too.)