E-Mail This Article to a Friend Is the price right? Mike Albo makes his point BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Mike Albo is obsessed with fame — but not necessarily with being famous. He’s more fixated on the mechanics of celebrity culture. But that’s only one of his many sources of fascination, all of which he skewers in his latest solo show, My Price Point, which he brings to Boston next Thursday under the auspices of the Theater Offensive.

Albo, who last appeared in town with his comic trio Unitard, has been busy with much more than delivering feverish pot shots at botoxed babes and manic cell-phone addicts. He recently penned a novel with his pal Virginia Heffernan, television critic at the New York Times. The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life is a fictionalized case study of the type of person who thrives on condescension and attacking your self-esteem. "I thought the Underminer was gonna be very New Yorky at first, but as I did the character in different cities, I realized s/he’s more universal — kinda like the vampire Lestat," he explains from his Park Slope apartment. "The Underminer is like a vampire, an ancient form of evil who thrives in contemporary society."

The novel is a stream of vignettes that demonstrate the Underminer in action, but for more vivid illustration, Albo has tossed a few impersonations of the character into the show. His snappy, feverish, performance style is informed by his stints as a fashion editor at Cargo and a fact checker at Paper. You hear childlike amazement in his voice when he talks about the jazzed-up language of ad copy.

Before those gigs, he was in graduate school for poetry, but it wasn’t long before discouragement set in. "I was having a really hard time boiling down expression into a tiny square in New Yorker font. But I love language and especially love, respect, and am obsessed by and am a slave to celebrity culture and ad and promotional copy. It’s just all around. We can’t escape it. To deny that we live in it and that it affects us is naive. So that’s what I’m obsessed with and freaked out by. Here are all these things that we’re obsessed with but can’t escape them." J. Lo, he says, "has been thrust in my face so many times," he can’t avoid deifying her.

There isn’t much irony that’s lost on Albo. Although much of My Price Point is a send-up of consumer culture, it got off the ground with a grant and accompanying costumes and props from Adidas. And as he lampoons what he refers to as an "insane gig" he once had dancing as a human logo for a pharmaceutical company, as he rails about our slavishness to brand marketing, a brand-name banner hangs behind him. He knows he couldn’t do the show without Adidas’s backing. "You can’t get arts grants unless you’re looking at the gay diaspora between blacks and whites in the Gullah. If you’re funny, you don’t get arts grants. We have to be part product, part logo. I don’t think you can do anything without branding and sponsorship. Now when we cry, we think we’re looking out a window in a music video. And we measure our love life to Julia Roberts."

My Price Point is presented by the Theater Offensive at the BCA Plaza Theatre, 527 Tremont Street in the South End, April 7 through 30. Tickets are $24 to $30; call (617) 933-8600, or visit www.bostontheatrescene.com