With his mild-mannered delivery and suburban boy-next-door looks, Birbiglia is a kinder, gentle comic than the usual dick-joke meisters. Smarter, too. He’s just begun a campus tour that will bring him to Boston in April. Meanwhile, this new set is something of a “greatest hits,” with a live concert CD that includes some of his sharpest routines and a DVD with his appearances on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend stand-up TV show and three short clips from the cartoon series Shorties Watching Shorties. The topics: dating, food, and the possibility of dating food. (Birbiglia really likes pizza.) His white-bread persona comes under the scrutiny of his self-effacing humor, as does his avowed fear of bears, but he also plays with hip-hop’s egocentric antics and puts his own spin on the genre’s use of the word “nigga,” spinning off a quick series of crisp “cracka” jokes. Birbiglia tags the show with a couple of song satires, skewing both Christian rockers and faux sensitive lame-o guys who try to use guitars as a tool to pick up women at parties. And like his fellow Comedy Central regular Jim Gaffigan, he has an unpredictable repertoire of panda humor. A new trend? Ling Ling, beware.
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, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, Media, Television, TV Comedies, Jim Gaffigan, Mike Birbiglia, Less
