SATURDAY, JUNE 30:
After starting nearly thirty minutes late, the authors of McSweeney’s
“Comedy By Numbers” came out of hiding to a frigid audience. It had
been too crowded to shop for some time, leaving many people standing
in one spot reading and re-reading the same import-only reprint of
some acid-casualty’s prison diary/furniture design/Fellini
retrospective. So it took a minute for the crowd to hop on the
bandwagon. The authors, dressed in lab coats, presented several parts
of the book engulfed by the crowd. Their deadpan readings were pretty
slow but drew a few chuckles from the room. And then came their guest.
After announcing that Mr. Bob Odenkirk would not be appearing, the
authors introduced “Dax Mathers” to the center of the room. It turned
out Dax was Odenkirk’s frat-comic alter-ego, whose “double fists” were
brandished in the faces of every person he could get near. He started
his set with a push-up and kept up the manic pace rolling through a
series of failed observations interspersed with a brutal
inner-monologue broadcasting from the P.A. After five minutes, he was
gone, leaving us with leg cramps and the lab coats. The duo closed out
their presentation with a tutorial on the double-take and then they
were done roughly twenty minutes after starting. Like a Ramones show.
But slower and with less hair. (SOC)