Photo credit: Sara Bill
There are any number of brief, one or two-word phrases that writers use to give you a quick idea of what someone does—“underground filmmaker,” “singer-songwriter” and the like—but for certain artists and entertainers, this shorthand feels woefully inadequate. For instance, while it’s technically accurate to call John Hodgman a “comedian” or “humorist,” those terms do little to actually describe his colorful, unpredictable career. He’s been an author of fake encyclopedias, served as the living embodiment of a clunky PC in a series of Mac ads and presided over a podcast courtroom among other personas and misadventures, all of which take his naturally dry, matter-of-fact demeanor and thrust it into some new, and usually flat-out surreal, premise, making it hard to know what to expect live, other than a lot of laughs.
One thing you can usually count on when he goes on tour though is that he’ll be in the company of some of his talented friends, which Monday night meant Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, better known to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans as the brains behind smart-alecky robots Crow and Tom Servo. Here, as opposed to being silhouettes on a screen, they tackled a number of bits, most memorably one that mined IMDB for the most ludicrous, riff-worthy movie titles of 2014 (Mutant Apocalypse in Drugfuck Deathcamp sounds like a real winner), before closing with a couple of songs, including a crowd-pleasing arrangement of the Game of Thrones theme for acoustic guitar and nose flute. Soon, they were introducing Hodgman, but which Hodgman would it be? The Deranged Millionaire? The Resident Expert? Ayn Rand?
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When he appeared he was sporting a parka, baseball cap and sunglasses, but these were discarded after serving as props for his opener, illustrating why strangers were perturbed to see him strolling through a cemetery with his young daughter. Underneath was his default sensible suit, appropriate since the material, covering family, anxiety and mortality instead of mole-men and hobos, revealed a rarely seen side of Hodgman: him just being himself. That sounds dark, but his drolly calm voice makes even stark observations seem whimsical, sometimes profound. He closed by breaking out his ukulele, serenading the audience with earnest renditions of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” and The Handsome Family’s “So Much Wine” to round out arguably his best set to date. Who’d have thought his most entertaining gimmick would be no gimmick at all?
