Dan’s Top 100 Everything: Honorable Mention – These Are Jokes

These_Are_Jokes

This might be my favorite comedy album ever. Demetri Martin is famous for his Important Things show, which takes advantage of his unique approach to comedy of integrating physical and visual bits into his standup. This would make make a comedy album counter-intuitive, but it turns out Demetri is funny enough with just his writing and improvisation to make a comedy album work.

He also throws in a few twists, strumming a guitar as he tells jokes or having Will Forte sing improvised bits between his jokes. But all of that is window dressing: the focus is on Martin’s jokes.

Martin’s style is in the spirit of Mitch Hedberg and Steven Wright, spouting sarcastic one-liners and quips. His delivery is spot-on, here, too. On some YouTube clips of his specials he seems a little bit awkward, but not at all here.

There are a handful of tracks at the end of the album that are studio-style joke songs that I’ve never listened to more than once, but the first ten or so tracks are all classics.

A few classic lines from the album (imagine a very sarcastic delivery):

  • “I think hair gel was invented to make it easier to identify assholes from a distance.”
  • “I bought a dictionary. The first thing I did was look up the word ‘dictionary’, and it said ‘you’re an asshole’.”
  • “A dreamcatcher works… if your dream is to be gay.”

Anyways, in the process of looking up and listening to the album again to write this, I discovered he released another album in 2012 called Standup Comedian, which I’m going to go listen to now.

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Dan and Brian from Earn This now have a film review site and podcast:

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