On his second stand-up album, Eugene Mirman cracks about honing himself into a "comedy missile." One wishes that he would. Few comedians are as nimble and imaginative, but Mirman oversettles for the slapdash and scattershot. Perhaps his loving, "in the know" audiences aren't offering him enough of a challenge-- this disc captures folks full-on cackling at ho-hummers-- but he could easily morph into a titan if he concentrated on the friction between Mirman the humor artiste and Mirman the mere entertainer.
Mirman "gets political," but thankfully, he lacks Lenny Bruce's self-absorption and Bill Hicks' lone-rebel shtick. He riffs on pop surreality and isn't afraid to crowd-please, but he never ventures into the safety-first, Abercrombie & Fetchit consumer-hoedown of Dane Cook. But (to be presumptuous) some nugget of slacker cowardice seems to be holding him back from taking more interesting risks than wallowing in TV minutiae and making glib (but okay, funny) sport of Republicans and Christians. His bit on the New Testament's being repackaged as a teen magazine is all but plagiarized from multiple primary-source routines that David Cross did with Christian pamphlets, dating guides, and sandwich liners.
One's heart goes out to Mirman, though: Reality competes fiercely with his fantasias, and he appears lazy next to it. That the New Testament was actually repackaged as a teen magazine is so hilarious; Mirman's like a guy at a car wreck autopsy pointing out that the proceedings are kind of gross. His first album was called The Absurd Nightclub Comedy Of..., but his absurdity isn't the alienated, despair-at-irrationality kind. Rather, he comes across as adrift in pop cultural dross. This album's title testifies that he doubts comedy's revolutionary power. "Society" once saw fit to fear comedians: sounding almost like Hitler's invections against degenerate painters, Time magazine ran a story in 1959 on the mostly (like Cross and Mirman) Jewish stand-ups, calling them "Sickniks" and citing their "disturbing hostility to the world." Certainly 2006 is as anxiously provocative a time to be alive as 1959, yet Mirman is (okay, hilariously) targeting VH-1? And the short films on the accompanying DVD are a snooze; several of them circulate via YouTube. A funnier time can be had playing the Requiem For a Dream soundtrack while watching that video of televangelist Pat Robertson leg pressing a thousand pounds.
Consumption links Mirman's greatest non-sequiturs, such as jokes about burgers stuffed with failure and trading abortion anesthesia for Papa John's pizza. He can mine his Russian Jewish heritage without getting everything all illuminated. He deeply resents false authorities. He's not as misanthropic as Sarah Silverman. But when he's only "cute" or "silly," listening to this disc is a poor substitute for a conversation with a witty friend. Hopefully your life is vivid and your crew produces enough observational banter to prevent you from having to outsource your yucks by purchasing any but the most deliberate comedy commodities. Where's the danger, Mirman? Where's the focus? In pop's own haggard terms: This plane needs more mothafuckin snakes.
