Ladies and Gentlemen, Jen Kirkman.

My desultory investigations into the world of stand-up comedy have returned substantial riches; my life would be significantly poorer without the viewpoints of Eugene Mirman, Mike Birbiglia, Demetri Martin, Maria Bamford, Jimmy Pardo, Louis CK, and Todd Barry. It may be noticed (if you’re deeply into the scene) that these are all comedians with CDs out. I hardly ever see live stand-up, partly because Phoenix is a shit town for comedy, and partly because I hardly ever go out to see anything, even movies. I’m a reclusive bastard.

But I was thrilled when Jen Kirkman’s debut CD, Self Help, appeared as the debut release on Aspecialthing Records. I knew of Kirkman from aspecialthing.com’s podcasts and message board (I lurk) as one of the greatest unkown comedians in the LA scene. (Unknown in the wider-culture sense, that is. In comedy circles, especially what used to be called alternative comedy, she’s a star. I found out about this whole scene, by the way, by Googling “alternative comedy.” Internet 1, real world 0.) I ordered the CD online, and had it in a surprisingly short period of time. After spending a few weeks with it, I’m prepared to make the following statement: Jen Kirkman is awesome.

It’s doubtful that she’ll ever be a superstar, though; and not just because of the glass ceiling for women in comedy. Her performance persona is too close to what most of us are used to thinking of as “real” — she hesitates, fumbles, leaves one sentence half-said and jumps to another one as though it’s all being made up on the spot, as though all the ideas in her head are battling for expression. She sounds nervous, even though she’s not, and at first that unusual delivery put me off, until she won me over with content. And then I discovered that she rewards repeat listenings; those apparent stumbles and half-expressed thoughts are part of the structure of the joke. She’s intentionally keeping the audience off-balance, never letting them get into the setup-punchline rhythm familiar from so much mainstream comedy, good as well as bad. Quite often the funniest lines are buried in her delivery, as though she doesn’t think much of them or as though they’re not the point of what she’s talking about. The point (the pseudo-point, that is; the real point is always laughter) is self-expression, a sympathetic caricature of a woman baring her soul in deprecatory self-analysis. Sure, there’s plenty of faux-humiliation, and she gets plenty of mileage out of realities, like her Catholic upbringing or her fear of flying, but she’s much more grounded and sane than she pretends to be for the sake of the act (and is annoyed when people can’t tell the difference). I might be able to work in something about her feminist subversion of the typically-male power structure of comedy, but that sounds unutterably dull and besides I’ve analyzed the comedy too much already. As Jimmy Pardo puts it on his Pompous Clown CD, “There’s no pressure on you people! Sit back, strap it down and laugh your asses off, you motherfuckers! Goddammit!”

I linked to her blog earlier; I also wanted to point out a few posts that not only made me smile, they’re two of the finest examples of Internet writing (that quintessentially ephemeral form) I’ve seen. First, a random grace-note in an ordinary day. Second, a series of posts about youth and age that contains some of the clearest, least-self-involved thinking I’ve ever read.

If it weren’t such an overintellectual killjoy, I’d say something about the overarching humanism in the comedy that I love, the underlying demand for respect and even common decency without failing to bring the funny. Shock comedy, funny only because of its amorality, we have with us always, but those who have a point of view worth listening to are all too rare.