The title of stand-up comedian Eugene Mirman’s third album would certainly catch you if you were to spy it out of your peripheral on a shelf in a music store. It seems to follow that postmodern trend where song titles and album titles resemble word salads. The thing about this particular name is that it’s from a bit off of the album (indeed a more conventional form of naming an album), and the title track is probably as “offensive” or “edgy” as Eugene Mirman gets.
But who is this Eugene Mirman? Well Wikipedia and IMDB might mention his appearances on Adult Swim or Comedy Central or, most famously, his recurring role on the college-popular Flight of the Conchords’ TV show. And they’d be right. He’s also a stand-up comedian, and a pretty good one at that. I loved Eugene Mirman’s first two albums, with their surreal bits and material culled from the oddest places. I loved his mumbling delivery and the almost childlike glee with which he delivers each punchline, varying vocal inflection enough to keep the audience members on their toes. So of course I was excited to listen to a new Mirman album. As soon as I got it, I rushed like Charlie with the golden ticket to get it all ready and queued up. I hit play and…
Sigh. 41 minutes later and I’m surprised to find I didn’t really have that many good laughs, or even that little mental “well, that was clever” which is like laughter, but without all the fun.
My main complaint is… well my main complaint is that it isn’t all that funny, which is like opening a restaurant with cuisine that’s entirely inedible. He drags out one bit about getting his luggage lost by an airline for roughly 13 minutes. That’s bordering on a third of the album and, unlike a good Pink Floyd song, the bit can’t hold a third of the album’s weight. Complaining about airlines is an area that’s been mined by other comedians until still other comedians had to go dangerously far into the comedy mines to find new things, and now the mine’s collapsed. And there’s no comedy UN to help the trapped miner-comedians (not saying the UN would help trapped miners anyway… (ZING! got all political on your asses there. Yeah, I said it: The UN might not be entirely effective. So edgy, so brutally edgy.)). That is to say, it’s been done before. And better.
Also, Mirman seems to be little more than a caricature of himself on this album. That endearing, quirky comedian? Now seems more like a tired shtick (yeah, it’s an onstage persona, but he does it well enough that it comes off as genuine). And that low key delivery? It seems a bit angrier, speeding as he fires off all his material so he can get off the stage. And you sort of want him to. This isn’t the Eugene Mirman of the past two albums. That one was generally funny.
I might seem hypercritical of the whole thing, but that’s because I like Eugene Mirman, and this new album doesn’t reach the precedent set by his old stuff. You might laugh, but people who would want to try Mirman would be better off starting with his previous two efforts. It’s kind of a downer ending to recommend other output at the end of an article, isn’t it? It’s a bit like an underdog movie where the underdogs get curb stomped or a buddy cop flick where the buddy cops end up more racist than at the start of the movie That’s how life is sometimes, though. Sometimes, the end of something just seems incomplete.
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