Eugene Mirman's been responsible for some entertainingly preposterous comedy albums, but his stand-up sometimes feels more like an entry point than the entire package. It's integral to his career, but it's only one part of his repertoire-- a modern take on the glib ridiculousness and lighthearted arrogance that once were Steve Martin's specialties. And, like Martin, Mirman's recurring TV comedy roles ("Flight of the Conchords"; "Delocated") and writings (last year's exercise in self-help delirium The Will to Whatevs) display a range of humor at which stand-up can only hint. So when someone is so consistently and accessibly funny in all these different venues-- on the stage, on cable, in print, on his blog, on YouTube-- what's another 40ish minutes?
Yet Mirman's second CD for Sub Pop, God Is a Twelve-Year-Old Boy With Asperger's, is just as characteristically amusing as anything else he's done in the past few years. It crams a lot of absurdity into its first half-hour: a discussion on bears living in the ruins of Detroit culminates in a debate between Mirman and an ursine member of the audience ("But there are bears! There's some in East Lansing--" "RERARARHGHG"), his tendency to concoct nonsensical slogans results in ideas for deranged internet banner ads ("Should the Iraq war be a war, or something else, like donuts or television?"), and there's a telling story about how a school-age Mirman delivered a book report by dressing as a cowboy and lip-synching a Bill Cosby record, subsequently dooming him to six years of special ed ("you get an A+, but you have to see a doctor").
Thankfully, Mirman's comedy never approaches the tedium of bad hey-remember-this pop-culture jokes or slapped-together "OMG random" ADD frivolity. It's more like a bewildered voyage through a mind that jumps from bafflement to surgical deconstruction in an instant. He throws around non sequiturs and oddball juxtapositions, but does so for real effect, using them them to punctuate the already existing weirdness of a situation, like he does when he deconstructs a Russian TV station's ethnically insensitive internet polls (Q: "Roma around the world get a hard time because..." The leading answer: "They have a longstanding criminal reputation") to riff off just how awkward racial discourse still is. And not just in Russia: Q: "How should we deal with racism in America?" A: "Have Bruce Springsteen write a letter to poor people explaining that black people are just like them, but black."
The drawback to this album is its drawn-out ending, which puts Mirman in vendetta-against-faceless-companies mode for the second time on the album. There's a lot of frustration-borne laughs in the first instance, where Mirman gets mad at the gas company for screwing up his account and responds with threats as creative as they are petulant ("I will be mailing you a photograph of cows having sex every day because it isn't illegal"). But when he revisits that turf in a tirade against the customer service ineptitude of an airline that lost his luggage-- roping in another couple of comedians to play the CSRs, one of whom does an admittedly funny Christopher Walken-- it loses a lot of the unpredictable yet to-the-point sharpness of the material earlier in his set, and it pales next to the similar "Fleet Bank" bit from The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman. The closest the "_____ Airlines" bits come to his usual brilliant absurdity is the fact that the airline in question has its name bleeped out, yet the bleep is so short it's hard not to guess which one it is anyways.
Granted, this isn't the first Eugene Mirman-based work of comedy you should buy. Absurd Nightclub Comedy is the best album to start with, and if you have to choose between God Is a Twelve-Year-Old Boy With Asperger's and The Will to Whatevs among his more recent offerings, go for the latter. But get this when you can, and give it a listen: Mirman is one of those comedians who just gets funnier with each new work he releases, and those 40ish minutes do a great job in moving that process along.
