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Two for the road
Black and Mirman go for the laughs
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
Related Links

Lewis Black's official Web site

Eugene Mirman's official Web site

Ted Drozdowski talks to Eugene Mirman about hanging in rock clubs.

Recording a comedy album is an act of courage. What’s funny on stage — where a little twist of body language can put a joke over or audience camaraderie can up the laugh ratio — is sometimes flat as a run-over dog on CD. And when a comedy disc belly-flops, there are no band mates to blame.

For veteran comedians like Lewis Black, albums are a test of their writing mojo and their own staying power. For relative newcomers like Eugene Mirman, they’re a way to try the waters — to discover whether routines honed over years in small clubs hold up outside the comfort zone. Black, who’s best known for his howling "Back in Black" screeds on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has just released his fourth album, Luther Burbank Performing Arts Center Blues (Comedy Central), a live recording of a June 18, 2004, Santa Monica show. Mirman, who cut his teeth on the Boston comedy circuit before moving to New York City, put out his debut, The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman, on the indie-rock label Suicide Squeeze a few months ago. It was recorded in March 2004 at Pianos in Manhattan and at the Middle East in Cambridge. Like many of the best indie-rock albums, it’s been slowly creating a buzz for itself in the underground.

Both albums are damn funny. As advertised, Mirman is more of an absurdist than Black, whose social commentary nonetheless keeps taking unpredictable flights. And Black seems more of an improviser. After a dig at the Bush administration ("If this is evolution in terms of leadership, I think in 12 years we’re gonna be voting for plants"), an audience member suggests Black run for president, and he’s off. "In the climate we live in, it would be ‘Mr. Black, did you ever do drugs?’ ‘Yeah, which ones you wanna know about? There were eight acid trips. You want ’em all together? Then there was the psilocybin. That was a mistake . . . ’ " Then he explains why — a hallucination where a zipper appears in the sky and Black freaks out. "I did not want to see bats and monkeys and whatever the fuck warlock shit comes out of that. Or what if a penis came out? Holy fuck. [Pause.] So I won’t be running."

Hacks like Leno and Letterman have been harping on Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction since last year’s Super Bowl. Feisty 56-year-old Black plays his topical humor as the observations of a bright, frustrated, and ultimately enraged everyman, spinning jokes on nipple clamps, Justin Timberlake, and Jackson as the federally branded cause of America’s woes into witty observations on censorship and fundamentalism. He also reaches deeper, lampooning NBC’s choice to hire MTV to assemble the Super Bowl’s musical program in the first place ("MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken") and making the prediction that "the half-time show in 10 years will literally be just planes flying over the stadium and dropping shit on people while an orchestra plays classical music."

Right now, after years of struggling as a playwright and a slow evolution into stand-up, Black’s mojo is definitely working. Besides his weekly Daily Show spots, he’s on the road in a tricked-out bus headlining 250 dates a year. Mirman, besides appearing on HBO and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, has been doing get-in-the-van tours like, and with, the indie bands he loves, who include Modest Mouse and the Shins.

Talking dogs, Teen Wolf, the Gay Wars of Mesopotamia, and comparative religion ("Shintoism? A reverence for nature spirits and ancestors with no formal dogma? Get real, Japan!") all pop up in Mirman’s rambling, daft discourse. As the performance rolls along, he spins an appealing, surreal web strong enough to capture the rock audiences he recorded in front of as well as eavesdroppers at home. "People think kids say the darndest things," he says, making use of a 40-year-old call-back. "So would you if you had no education." Anyone who’s dealt with bill collectors will dig his jibe at Bank of America predecessor FleetBank, which, Mirman says, reading from a letter of protest he wrote to its customer-service department, will kill his family if he doesn’t pay up and, if given a chance, "would replace lovable Santa Claus with Christmas Hitler."

Like so many indie-rockers, he dabbles with remixing on The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman’s final track, but his blend of beats and tag lines from his bits isn’t stand-alone funny. He’s also a deranged and accomplished maker of short satirical videos that are sometimes a highlight of his club shows. A bonus disc features his shorts "Gun," "Art," "Pot," and "Backdraft II," though his best, missing, is a gag on the plastic-bag scene in American Beauty. Here only "Gun," a satire of TV-cop-show hardware slinging and the American fascination with firearms, grows wings. But by then Mirman, like Black, has taken us to some funny, inspired places.


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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