Recap Demetri Martin at the Gentile Center

Among the slight mugginess, the announcement to “vote in the upcoming student election,” and the fact that Loyola's Gentile Center serves as a basketball gymnasium, Demetri Martin's show felt more like a high-school assembly than a comedy show. But on Thursday night, the 35-year-old surrealist comic kicked off his tour in support of Comedy Central’s Important Things With Demetri Martin in grand style—on the same floor that the Ramblers lost their regular season finale a month ago. Martin wasted no time pointing out the venue’s foibles, observing that the gym’s awkward bleacher setup made sneaking out difficult and created “a weird peeing situation,” suggesting many in the audience would resort to letting urine “trickle out slowly.”

 

Once the basketball banners were suitably analyzed, Martin pulled out 20 minutes of newish-sounding material built on his usual mélange of observations, non-sequiturs, and paraprosdokians. What changes would Demetri make in his world? No more yelling "surprise" at surprise parties, because “it’s so redundant. You don’t have to yell ‘surprise’ in that situation. I came home, my apartment was dark, and you emerged from my couch.” His suggestion? Yell “diarrhea!” Also, no more half-sizes for shoes. “We could have just had twice as many shoe sizes and then fractions would not have been necessary.” Within 10 jokes, it's clear Martin’s stand-up is an entirely different animal than his Daily Show appearances. Without sketches or commercial breaks, the routine built up an unrelenting rhythm, rolling from joke to joke and winning the rowdy college hooligans with each payoff. Even when his “losing a pen cap is like cancer for a marker” joke was relatively ill-received, Martin had a quick save from Norm MacDonald's playbook: muttering into a tape recorder, “Maybe don’t say cancer at a comedy show.” In the evening’s most honest and telling moment, Martin pulled out a familiar joke from Important Things and asked afterwards whether or not anyone recognized it (a sizable chunk did).

Though often lauded as the heir to Mitch Hedberg’s deadpan wordplay throne, Martin should perhaps be better known for his contributions to prop comedy, a style that's in rigor mortis today at best. Martin’s drawings and graphs have become the bread and butter of his set, and fittingly the night’s cleverest jokes came from the pages of a large pad labeled “LARGE PAD.” The image of the “baby silencer"—“a funnel that the baby wears over its face and mouth with a tube that goes to headphones that go to baby’s own ears”—had the audience’s approval even before its explanation. A curve chart depicted the amount a person looks like Jesus versus the probability he will have pot (a gradually positive slope, until a critical point when a cross becomes involved), which prompted many in the college-dominated audience to chuckle, “It’s funny cause it’s true.”

The evening’s final prop-centric segment produced spurts of borderline euphoria in the gym. Martin presented flyers he allegedly found around campus, with gems like, “Learn to play guitar and/or my balls,” “Free candy—for kids only. No parents. No taddle tales. Really good candy. Only little kids, seriously,” “So, you want to learn how to play saxophone? I can stop you! Call immediately,” and “Help, a wizard turned me into a piece of paper. Please lick twice to break the spell.” Could anything top the flyer bit? A dreary, piano-based song in which Martin melodramatically retold the police blotter from the student newspaper came close. Fortunately, the big finale was Martin closing with a crowd-pleaser: busting out his acoustic guitar, harmonica, and saying, "I'll take requests for jokes." He did several favorites from 2006's These Are Jokes with a few new nuggets sprinkled amongst them, which was a tad bizarre when the crowd would recite punch lines like "glitter is the herpes of craft supplies" aloud. But still, this was a show that proved Martin may have his own show, but he hasn't forgotten how to play to a crowd.