Comedy: Demetri Martin

This article originally appeared on the Such Small Portions website, here.

Demetri Martin - These Are Jokes (Comedy Central Records)

Demetri Martin is a very natural comedian. He looks and sounds very honest, in his simple clothes, a self-confessed “gay Beatles” haircut and a youth defying his thirty-five years.

He’s a Greek lad raised in New Jersey, and he’s really smart. He’s won awards and contributes for The Daily Show. His stand-up consists largely of deadpan one-liner, but his real talent lies in the different ways he brings them all to life.

Admirably on These Are Jokes, there’s a CD and a DVD, containing mostly different materials. The DVD is taken from a 2004 Comedy Central special where he uses David Shrigley like animations and a deliberately amateurish stage show including his Mum and Grandma to give his jokes new life. It works impressively.

On the CD, recorded in Chicago, he uses guests – Leo Allen and Will Forte – and song. Best of all is Sames And Opposites, sung in a moody Leonard Cohen style, including being impressively lyrical. “Earrings are the same as sneezes, two is okay, but ten is annoying”; “A squirrel is the same as a can, when there’s a bb gun in my hand”; Saying ‘sorry’ and ‘I apologise’ is the same, except when you’re at a funeral.”

The world he creates is admirable. He’s not particularly political of philosophical, or even deep. This is almost certainly deliberate. He strips things down his observations to well thought out surrealism: “I bet drowning is a really horrible experience, unless right before that you’re really thirsty. That’s why when I go out on the water I take a life jacket and a bag of potato chips. I wanna go out quenched.”

On the DVD there are clips of early gigs. One where he has a beard, plays a yo-yo and rides a unicycle, the other where he’s short haired, awkward and in a plain, grey sweatshirt. They just go to show how far he’s come. He is slick and masterful in his audience control. He is quiet and unenergetic enough to demand close attention to his words, meaning the smallest look, frown or smile is funny.

He slips easily from the banal: “If I have the choice between and escalator and an elevator, I always take the elevator. I tripped on an escalator once and fell down the stairs for an hour and a half”; to sociology: “Camouflage clothing is great when you’re in the woods and you want to blend in; when you’re in the city, it’s like: there’s an asshole”; to death: “Batteries are the most dramatic of objects. Everything else breaks or stops working. Batteries die.”

In short, the man’s impressive. Ambidextrous in the extreme, he uses his skills well, Bill Bailey like musicianship combining with his Woody Allen like observations. He’s also incredibly funny. “I think they named oranges before they named carrots,” being