Recap Christian Finnegan at Majestic Theatre

Comedian Christian Finnegan showed the crowd at the Majestic Theatre on Saturday night a few different sides of himself—all at once. He's not particularly manly (except in France), he's a drama-club dork, and he's also not above greeting his audience with: "Hello, fuckfaces.... you've all made a very wise entertainment choice." (Don't worry, afterward he was very nice about signing copies of his recent DVD, Au Contraire!—"Dear Scott, thanks 'n shit"—and having his picture taken with fans.) But he's a pro. He doesn't always make you feel invested in what he's saying (like Louis CK, for example), but he's got a personality and riffing style that could tackle just about any weird, mundane, or vaguely uncomfortable subject matter, and in a very pointed way.

And considering Finnegan's short, disturbingly vertical blond hair, slim figure, and metro-dapper outfit that's complete with tie clip, "pointed" is the word for his stage presence, too. Finnegan's act is a series of gleefully fast jabs, so even some of the less imaginative material has a consistently funny sting to it. That said, there are plenty of bits that tear into ordinary subjects in unexpectedly witty ways. For example, the gradual death of names like "Gertrude" and the folly of naming a baby "Hank." "At least once, a Myron fucked the shit out of a Gertrude," probably sometime in 1893, he concluded.

Finnegan apparently gets to have it both ways when criticizing douchebags, too: He's not masculine enough to be one of them (though "In Paris, I am a walking Ted Nugent song"), but he's also boisterous and needling enough to attack them on their own verbal level. Especially when one asserts that he's just "gotta be me" or that he's his "own worst critic." And like less crafty, more famous comics, he gets to milk words like "chihuahua" for all their mouth-smooshing weirdness—"chew-ah-wah." But he usually goes somewhere with such riffs, in this case, speculating on how a drunken God might have created this "eye and ear caddy" of a dog, and giving it the new scientific name canis ridiculum.

Latin aside, Finnegan isn't so caught up in cleverness that he won't give the lowbrow its due: "There really is nothing funnier than making dumb noises.... that's why in an argument between smart and stupid, stupid will always win." Indeed, the best part of his bit criticizing how women high-five (a "shot put" movement, he called it) was Finnegan's repeated use of this nasally strangled-elephant "eeeeeeeh!" noise that ladies apparently make when five-ing. Hell, he finished his set with a fucking elevator fart joke; though, it admittedly set a high bar for elevator fart jokes.

To all the new graduates out there, he proclaimed, "School's back in session! If I was some comedians, I would say that without any irony. 'School's back in session!'—then flames go up in the background." Not unlike Dan Deacon a couple weeks ago, Finnegan was also smart enough to address the folks in the Majestic's relatively low-hanging opera boxes: "Too good to sit down among the hoi polloi." The set reached its high point when Finnegan brought up his father-in-law, who he says is doing prison time in Texas for attempted murder. When a lone cheer went up in the crowd, he asked, "Are you from Texas, or are you just a murder fan?" He wondered how real murderers in prison might rag on attempted murderers, making clumsy stabbing motions and yelling, "Where's the heart?"

The audience took pretty easily to Madison stand-up Nick Mortensen's opening and host spots—he's sort of the Majestic's comic-in-residence by now. Some of his bits, like one about a guy who lost his two front teeth but bought a new pickup truck ("We've got corn-on-the-cob season coming up!"), made up for a rather drawn-out section about his love for Brett Favre. (In short, he would let Favre fuck him in the ass.) Chicago's Chad Briggs began his feature set by pretending to mistake the Majestic for a venue in Clearwater, Fla., renamed his living room a "malaise cave," and generally offered a very likable and promising stage presence. The material was solid, except for his bit about Domino's gross pasta bowl. (Dear all comedians everywhere: This has been done. It's called Patton Oswalt's "famous bowl" bit. All other gross-fast-food bits are useless in its wake.) Especially after Briggs recalled how a childhood game of make-believe Star Wars turned into a proselytizing session—one of his friends, playing Chewbacca, asked another, playing Han Solo, to accept Jesus—Decider wouldn't mind catching him again.