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Stand-up guy
How Eugene Mirman spent his Christmas vacation
BY IAN SANDS

Eugene Mirman got together with a few musician friends at P.A.’s Lounge last Friday to celebrate the holidays and to hear some "great rock and roll," as the former Somerville resident said near the end of his very short first set. In the past few years, he’s toured with Modest Mouse, the Shins, and the Hold Steady, and he has a two-disc album in the works for Sub Pop. On this night, however, he found himself sharing a stage with a trio of bands representing Total Gaylord Records, a label so tiny that, according to TGR head Don Shumai (also guitarist/vocalist for the Boston-based band Shumai, and a friend of Mirman’s), it was created "when it became painfully obvious not even the smallest labels were interested in us."

Sandwiched among the sets by Shumai, Vermont’s Colin Clary and the Magogs, and New York’s Metric Mile (who with their keyboard-heavy electro-derived pop elicited the most vigorous head nodding of the three), Mirman offered frustratingly brief bits of stand-up as well as snatches of homemade videos from his Web site (http://www.eugenemirman.com/). Poking fun at the situation he found himself in, he introduced his own act ("Ladies and gentleman, Eugene Mirman!") with mock reverence before launching into a story about his recent trip to Edinburgh ("You can get swords and shit, everywhere you go there’s just tons of stuff for fighting dragons").

It’s easy to see why Mirman spends so much of his time performing at indie-pop-friendly clubs like P.A.’s. Attempting to suppress fits of laughter by burying their heads in their neighbors’ shoulders, the sweater-vested folks seemed tailor-made for his brand of alt-humor. They even stuck with him during an imagined Playgirl quiz that devolved into cum and boner jokes — which begs the question, aren’t twee-popsters really just as perverted as the rest of us?

One heckler interrupted the second set by chanting for more boners, but the horny devil had to settle for a story about a friend of Mirman’s who hung out with a stranger for the day and a corresponding video in which Mirman ticks off absurd factoids about Canada ("If you were to line everyone in Canada up on each other’s shoulders, they would reach the moon and back"). The bit would have been familiar to anyone keeping up with his Village Voice blog, "Hello I’m Eugene," but that didn’t keep those who’d already seen it from busting a gut. Like a band’s live act, a comic’s stand-up performance is less about substance than it is about delivery; the mark of excellence is being able to score laughs the second time around.

Ian Sands can be reached at isands[a]phx.com


Issue Date: December 23 - 29, 2005
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