T.J. Miller at the Comedy Club on State
To any given person, T.J. Miller could be the annoying dude from behind the camera in Cloverfield or the brilliant satirist that trolled an entire production into casting him in Yogi Bear. But it was Miller’s stand-up persona—relaxed and unflappable—that came to perform at the Comedy Club on State on Friday night, and while he didn’t have any hecklers in the early show on which to riff, he still went out of his way to put on a show full of surprises.
Host Bryan Morris started off by taking us through the dark side of Facebook Timeline (read: the part of it filled with drunken photos in need of deletion) before hitting his stride by dropping the best names for a soon-to-be-murdered hamster imaginable—truly, faced with an irresponsible 7-year-old owner, Inspector Butterscotch never stood a chance. Nick Vatterott delivered a robot-reference-laden set punctuated with a closing bit that clearly mistook an imitation of a Wisconsin woman in the throes of passion for the moans of a filthy Minnesotan, much to the chagrin of the crowd.
Miller finally took the stage looking something like Doctor Who’s Captain Jack Harkness in a Jheri curl, jumping into Wisconsin-centered material after briefly wandering around the brick-backed stage at the club. Leaning on the walls, pacing from edge to edge of the tiny raised stage, he pondered almost to himself whether the bricks behind him were real or simply painted to look like a comedy club circa 1985.
With insight into one of Madison’s root cultural issues, Miller asked of the non-students in the crowd: “What’s it like to live in a city where 40,000 of the people just suddenly leave town twice a year?” He concluded that the students ought to descend upon another Wisconsin town like Oshkosh, if only to overrun and confuse the shit out of them. And when he went for the low-hanging fruit of jokes about cheese, mocking the absurdity of Wisconsin’s pride for what is arguably just a sandwich component, he still drew big laughs from the crowd.
After an extended anecdote about the tribulations of traveling with medical marijuana, Miller closed out the show by producing two bootleg copies of his own Comedy Central special, explaining that they were too cheap to give him any copies to sell on his own. It wasn’t a bit—he actually had them on hand at the door of the club. It was just one last piece of absurdity in a show that stacked purposeful comedy on top of unexpected laughs.
