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More About

• Demetri Martin
• The Daily Show
• The Beatles
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Books and Literature

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If comedian Demetri Martin’s career were dropped into one of his trademark pie charts, one slice would be “Comedy Central star,” one slice would be “law school dropout,” one slice would be “Daily Show correspondent,” and a tiny sliver, really just a line, would be “masturbation.” That’s our impression of a Martin joke. We’ll be here all week! If you like, change “masturbation” to “hair” — his hair is the stuff of Pantene commercials. He usually goes for Bieber-like bangs, but in the promo for his book tour (make This Is a Book another slice on the chart), they form a wall over his eyes, resurrecting New York club kids MisShapes, which is surely ironic. When Important Things with Demetri Martin premiered on Comedy Central, Martin was labeled a hipster comedian in the media. That sort of label can hurt someone, and it might have hurt him, but he wasn’t a hipster comedian at all. He was just a guy with a Beatlemania hairdo and a guitar who, in the age of Excel, liked to line draw charts while gently and hilariously tweaking himself and others, rather than destroying both. He seems more Boulderian (Colorado) than Williamsburgian (New York). His book offers an assortment of essays, short jokes, and drawings, and it starts like so: “How to Read This Book: If you’re reading this sentence you’ve pretty much got it.”
Thu., May 5, 7 p.m., 2011