Thursday, December 23, 2010

Video: Demetri Martin / If I (one man show)

Okay, not technically music-related here, but Demetri sometimes plays guitar, piano, harmonica, or bells (sometimes a bunch at once, like in Person!) during his standup, so it's okay. Plus, he's brilliant and I need to share this. I've loved his standup for a long time; I caught his Comedy Central Presents special on TV back in the day, then his hour-long specials, then the Important Things show, and he came to my undergrad college sometime during my junior year, too. They're all awesome: funny, insightful, intelligent, uplifting, etc. This is the kind of comedic style (and personality, even) that I wish I could embody.

I watched the first six episodes of Important Things on Netflix earlier tonight and it reminded me of how great the show is. I did some Googling to try and find a link to that sketch from the show on "Chairs" where the guy finds a piece of gum under his chair and then they play the scene backwards and find out where the gum came from . . . yeah, it's hilarious and ingenious, but I couldn't find the link. I did, though, rediscover these videos in the process. If I was Demetri's one-man show during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. In a way, it seems like it was a big gateway into his comedy career: I recognize some of the jokes from his early standup specials, and the overall theme of the show is describing his life and way of thinking and how he had come to realize that this is what he wanted to do and be and so on. It's inspiring and funny and you really need to watch it. All of it. So here it is:







I find it weird that each of these videos has a different number of views, because I can't imagine watching just one of these without seeing them all straight through (like I just did).

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