Recap Patton Oswalt and David Cross at the Congress Theater

Stand-ups Patton Oswalt and David Cross sarcastically pulverize a lot of the same absurdities—religion, crappy consumer products, themselves (Oswalt for being fat and too cynical; Cross for literally shitting his pants). Yet Oswalt's Friday show at the Congress Theater, and Cross' Sunday show at the same venue were two entirely different scenes—one of wry, bubbly wisdom; another gleefully inappropriate.

Oswalt and Cross never seem to hide behind their quirks. They genuinely A) are exasperated by the world they mock and B) put words together in explosive little patterns. Oswalt's show didn't even fill the theater, yet, as always, there was a warmth to his performance. It only helped that Oswalt was a little raw from sleepless nights spent raising his new daughter. At least half the set comprised bits heard on his new album My Weakness Is Strong, but this might've been a better way to hear most of them; he was even tighter and punchier here than at the album's Feb. 28 taping in D.C. "I hope my dick jokes make up for no Olympics [and] somehow fill the void of not having fencing here," he said.

Even while enduring the newfound strains of fatherhood—new parents "smell like cake mix and violence," he explained—Oswalt still wandered into unpleasantly weird situations and managed to treat those experiences as trippy privileges on the level of an astounding acid trip. He claimed that a couple had taken a picture with him earlier in the day without his consent—they'd noticed he was in a bad mood, so one of them just walked up to him as if he were "a cardboard cutout" while the other snapped away. Then they walked away and told him, "Looking forward to the show tonight!" That meant "they're fucking here!" Oswalt said, then proceeded to address them, not actually looking for them or asking them to come forward, but asking aloud, "What if I had been dead?" Still, something about Oswalt's delivery—lamenting the almost surreal decline of common decency—made it feel as if the situation had already been defused.

That's not a feeling you'll ever get from Cross. He enjoys a playfully antagonistic relationship with his audience, and certainly refreshed that with Chicago fans during Sunday's crowded set. He "interrupted" his hour and a half of new material several times, in fact, for impromptu sketches in which he confronted a deaf guy signing his own jokes in front of the stage (Cross dismissed him as "an anti-Semitic deaf fuck") and a blogger live-posting wildly inaccurate reports from the show. (Local sketch comic Mort Burke played both roles.) When Cross was introduced by opener Todd Glass, he first sent out a boy who couldn't have been more than 10 (though he showed a grasp of Cross-type language beyond his years: "We're gonna kick comedy's ass tonight!"), then followed that up with a long, cheesy musical number that had at least two bridges. "The time has come to tear this place a new asshole, and then we'll stitch that new asshole up with jokes," he said. Near the end of the show, someone in the balcony got up, shouted "Fuck you, David Cross! You're boring," then left. "I think he's a Christian!" someone else in the balcony shouted back, prompting Cross to wonder, "Why did he wait so long? He was just sitting there the whole time: 'Now I've had it... oh, no, now I've had it... I'll give him 10 more minutes.'"

As usual, watching Cross was a delightfully masochistic game (so was dealing with the Austin Powers look-alike, whom Cross presumably hired to mince about in the Congress' lobby bugging people before the show). He summed up the set's M.O. pretty well with this: "I'm not above doing airplane humor. I had to balance out the 25 minutes of religious material I've got." Indeed, before long, his hemming-and-hawing rabbi voice (as heard on 2002's epic rant Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!) returned to passive-aggressively chastise him for not buying a brand of products called If You Care (available at Whole Foods), and he sharply pointed out that announcing that a flight is non-smoking is about as obvious as saying that it's a "no slavery flight" and that the sun revolves around the Earth ("so sayeth Galileo," he added as a lovably obnoxious flourish).

Cross found a delicate balance between prodding and playfulness. He said he bought his girlfriend two vibrators: "One for home and one to take with her in case she gets raped" (the joke he says is his most polarizing, with good reason). He even returned to one of his favorite wildly inappropriate stomping grounds, imagining that pedophiles must get pissed off when kids don't understand the predators' compliments about their "azure" eyes. He turned the old "fool me once, shame on you..." aphorism into a Carlin-esque, play on language, getting up to "fool me 10 times" and freaking out about why all these people would be out trying to fool him.

Oswalt's a little more joyfully weird, Cross a little more joyfully confrontational, but each bookended the weekend with some of the most distinct stand-up out there.