Tomorrow night at 10PM EST, Demetri Martin returns to Comedy Central for his newest stand-up special Demetri Martin. Standup Comedian. It's been almost two and a half years since we last saw Martin onscreen on Important Things, but he's since kept himself busy working on his stand-up, screenplays, and second book Point Your Face at This., which comes out in March 2013. Earlier this week, I got a chance to chat with Martin about his upcoming special, his penchant for simplicity, and the best temperature for joke-telling.
So first how was your summer? What kind of things have you been working on?
Well, I’ve been [...]
Unpopular Opinions is a new weekly column in which a writer takes a stand against popular opinion, whether it's asserting the true merit of a supposedly guilty pleasure or dissenting against the universally lauded.
Joke “stealing” is not a new phenomenon. Hell, Milton Berle basically made a career out of it, earning himself the nickname, “The Thief of a Bad Gag.” With the rise of the Internet and cellphone cameras, however, it seems like fans have started to care more. But how did something that used to only be a comedy community matter give birth to a legion of joke vigilantes?
Let’s start with a couple examples.
Example [...]
This is a review of a book entitled This is a Book by Demetri Martin. The book was written by Demetri Martin, of course. The title is not the only reason, however, why it could not have possibly been written by anyone else.
There has always been a matter-of-fact post-modernism to the way Demetri Martin packages himself, and his literary debut is a remarkable translation of that unique aesthetic into book form. (That the author designed the jacket and cover artwork himself suggests that this process was a labor of love.) Several self-aware touches adorn the book, poking fun at the medium: a sly mock-tutorial, “How to read [...]
