By Sean Moeller
The rationale of some people forces us to poke fun at them. The silly and alarming things taken in and accepted as normal behavior and proper thinking are the juiciest fodder for Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, Amy Poehler and every single stand-up comic that roams this Earth. We look at the disconnected and the dense, then turn away and in the next room over or around the next corner we laugh our guts out at their expense.

Eugene Mirman, the 31-year-old comedian with the rock and roll friends, shaggy bed-head hair and boyish pudginess that normally distinguishes one as a big kid trapped behind budding man boobs, watches and listens for people to do things out in the world everyday that we’ve come to accept as normal and fine. Then he pipes in, “Wasn’t that fucked up? I know I thought it was fucked up.” Then we share a laugh, mostly at the slick and stupid ways advertisers attempt to dupe consumers into thinking their product is the coolest. Mirman’s comedy – a new collection of which, entitled “En Garde, Society!” is just now available on Sub Pop Records – is rife with his observational humor twisted up with bizarre add-ons that takes what so funny in the first place into the kind of wacky league of many of the Adult Swim programs where there are no holds barred in the mission to get the most out of absurdity. He finds a great wealth of material in marketing.

A joke from the comedy missile’s new album: “There’s this fast food chain called Jack-In-The-Box. They had these giant posters – these ads – for chicken strips and on the poster it just said, ‘REAL!’ in huge letters. And it would have never occurred to me that their food wasn’t real until they insisted their food was real. Like if I went in and was like, ‘Can I have some chicken strips and they gave me something like, ‘This is a bag of dandelions! These aren’t chicken strips at all!’”

Toyota constantly wants to sell him a car and he can’t stand the Axe commercials whose premise is to “help you keep your cool around people who interfere with you fucking a drunk stranger.”

“They’re so unbelievably stupid and annoying, so stupidly sexual,” he said. “I like to be marketed to in a way where I’m not completely mad at Count Chocula.”

He has a modern way of debasing those clever marketing tactics and still getting caught in their snares often enough. That’s where the humor comes from – the reality that their efforts shouldn’t work, but we let them work anyway as we buy more Pepsi because Parker Posey’s jittering all around New York streets like she’s on drugs.

“If I saw an ad for some fantastic robot thing or a watch that was really technological, I would buy it,” Mirman said. “If it was robotic or delicious – a watch that you could bite.

“I go to Toys-R-Us periodically to see if there’s anything new and really cool. I recently bought a Darth Vader helmet. I love gadgets. I was at a mall recently and they had one of those Build-A-Bear booths in the middle of it. I’d never seen one of those before. I was very excited that you could record something for the bear to say. I made a teddy bear that now says, ‘I can shit ice cream.’ It’s really funny.”

The same can be said about Mirman, who is to goofy, thinking humor as Lewis Black is to pissed off, thinking humor. He is Harland Williams with a doctorate and without an acid dependency or whatever it is that gives him his schizophrenic powers. His take on marketing tactics and the utter insanity of them reminds me of the Comsumer Report skit on Saturday Night Live in 1976, featuring Candice Bergen as the hard-nosed reporter and Dan Aykroyd as Irwin Mainway of Mainway Toys, makers of Johnny Switchblade, Pretty Peggy Ear-Piercing Set, Mr. Skin-Grafter, General Tron’s Secret Police Confession and Doggie Dentist. Mainway attempts to justify each of his hazardous products with asinine counter-examples.

Consumer Reporter : Alright. Fine. Fine. Well, we’d like to show you another one of Mr. Mainway’s products. It retails for $1.98, and it’s called Bag O’ Glass. [ holds up bag of glass ] Mr. Mainway, this is simply a bag of jagged, dangerous, glass bits.

Irwin Mainway: Yeah, well, look – you know, the average kid, he picks up, you know, broken glass anywhere, you know? The beach, the street, garbage cans, parking lots, all over the place in any big city. We’re just packaging what the kids want! I mean, it’s a creative toy, you know? If you hold this up, you know, you see colors, every color of the rainbow! I mean, it teaches him about light refraction, you know? Prisms, and that stuff! You know what I mean?

Consumer Reporter: So, you don’t feel that this product is dangerous?

Irwin Mainway: No! Look, we put a label on every bag that says, “Kid! Be careful – broken glass!” I mean, we sell a lot of products in the “Bag O’” line.. like Bag O’ Glass, Bag O’ Nails, Bag O’ Bugs, Bag O’ Vipers, Bag O’ Sulfuric Acid. They’re decent toys, you know what I mean? – transcript courtesy of snltranscripts.jt.org

Mirman would have played Bergen’s part, only instead of probing, scolding and admonishing Mr. Mainway, he would have laughed until his sides felt like the mailbox in a game of mailbox baseball. He may have even high-fived Mainway for taking it to a new level of craziness. Then he would have bought a case of Bag O’ Vipers – two cases if they were edible or slightly robotic – still chuckling on his way out to his car.

www.eugenemirman.com
www.subpop.com
Eugene’s Village Voice blog
“Help yourself to more Saturday Night Live transcripts”: http://snltranscripts.jt.org