Whether wittily, if vacuously pontificating on “The Daily Show,” playing the beleaguered personal computer foil to Matt Long's victorious Mac in Apple commercials, or in any of the other forums that have granted John Hodgman “minor celebrity” (his words), he brings a steely self-assurance to comedy. His fictional non-fiction books, such as The Areas of My Expertise and That Is All, present a droll pomposity he is as apt to deflate as any critic. This persona relates to academic intelligentsia as Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central's pundit character does to the left's critic of rightist politics—a buffoon whose being in on the joke isn't tough to discern but is nevertheless hilarious.
Hodgman's act on TV has garnered a following comprised of "15 year-old nerd boys," as he puts it, but the act he will bring to Turner Hall (on which he says he has spent "the last 14 months half-writing") will be more adult than that portion of his audience may care to encounter. That is in part because it deals with the existential dilemma of realizing one's mortality, a subject he tackled in his Netflix special, “John Hodgman: Ragnorak,” wherein he anticipates the Mayan apocalypse in a combination of seriousness (he expected it to take place) and his customary wryness.
|
|
The teenage nerd boys may still want to find their way in, though, as Hodgman promises guest stars Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy of trash cinema commentary theater series “RiffTrax.”
8 p.m, Oct. 20, at Turner Hall Ballroom, 1034 N. 4th St.
