Not many comedians have a joke as memorable as a play on their name—but that’s what makes Russell Peters stand out. The Canadian stand-up began performing back in 1989 and never slowed down. The first comedian ever to get a Netflix stand-up special—2013’s “Notorious”—Peters was also named #3 on Forbes list of the world’s highest paid comedians. Since, he’s released follow-up Netflix special “Almost Famous” and Prime special “Deported,” on top of consistent TV and film work—hell, he’s even in the new “Clifford” movie! See what makes him so special at the Improv this weekend—if you can find tickets.

Russell Peters
Thurs-Sun, Various Times, Sold Out
The Improv, San Jose

CHRIS PORTER SUMS up his latest standup special by highlighting what it lacks: “No politics, no religion, no racism,” Porter says of A Man From Kansas. Throughout his new special, Porter steers clear of overt partisanship, while still lampooning the tribal rituals that serve as flashpoints in the broader culture wars. “Hipster food,” people complacent with—or even proud of their ignorance—and toxic masculinity all draw his ire.

In A Man From Kansas we find Porter critical, matter-of-fact and annoyed. He pokes fun at social and cultural happenings in everyday life, but he rarely, if ever, mentions politics or religion—controversial themes which many contemporary comics employ. Still, his tactful criticisms do skirt hot button issues.

In one bit, Porter laments the trend of yuppies’ tendency to overthink comfort food. Porter is irked by the ubiquity of cheeseburgers topped with garlic aioli, arugula and havarti, and the dearth of no-frills diner fare in Los Angeles: “I just want breakfast, you know what I’m saying? I don’t want a Radiohead album.”

Later on, Porter critiques self-important ignoramuses and their penchant for shouting dumb ideas at anyone who will listen. Calling out flat-earthers and chemtrail believers, Porter goes off on those who have turned the internet into an echo chamber of idiocy and crackpot theories. “Google is not an answer engine; it’s a search engine,” Porter yells. “It doesn’t tell you when you’re being a dumbass. It just connects you with 80,000 other dumbasses who think the same dumbass shit as you do.”

Born and raised in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, Porter cut his teeth on the Midwest standup circuit before moving out to Los Angeles. He’s appeared on Season 4 of NBC’s Last Comic Standing and Tommy Chong’s Comedy@420 and has a trio of hour-long specials to his name. His blunt observational humor and clever, self-deprecating anecdotes certainly make for a winning combination, but Porter credits his success in large part to his aversion to direct political commentary.

“It’s just so polarized today,” Porter says, explaining his policy. “Nowadays, it’s hard to have a good conversation about these things. I dont think its our job as comedians to always provide a political angle. There’s so much other stuff to talk about that’s funny and that isn’t divisive.”

However, Porter’s acts still dance around tough topics. One particularly thorny issue he tackles in A Man From Kansas is toxic masculinity. Far too many men, he says, are unable to express emotions outside of happiness, anger and confusion, which often overlap. Porter also takes aim at “douchebags in positions of power,” who abuse their station to abuse and degrade women. He implores men to step their game up and rebuild what he refers to as “the man-brand” by treating women with respect.

Oh… And one more thing: “Please, for the love of God, stop sending people pictures of your dick,” he cracks. 

Porter, who’s been performing for 20 years, is getting ready to embark on yet another tour, which will bring him to the Bay Area for a four-night residency at the San Jose Improv. He’s looking forward to the road, as it is the place where he generates the majority of his material. After the release of a special, he’ll start from scratch, looking for new topics to tease out. Once he’s hit upon something he feels is resonating, he’ll sit down with a paper and pen, and map out the many possible directions the joke might go.

Still, keeping his performances fresh means leaving plenty of breathing room for his developing material. This is why, Porter says he enjoys playing places like San Jose.

“I’ve found that audiences on the coasts tend to be more open for you to explore” compared to audiences in other parts of the country, Porter says. “They’re cool with you not being funny for a second as you’re trying to find a new joke or premise. A lot of audiences out here are kind of hip to that. Folks in the Midwest tend to want to just hear the hits.”

Chris Porter
Thu-Sun, Various Times, $20+
The Improv, San Jose
improv.com/sanjose

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… sometimes. Five Bay Area comedians improvise bits based on prompts pulled at random from an envelope. The audience gets to choose the winner. Each comic later has the chance to win more laughs with a prepared set. The winner will advance to the finals, an improv showcase slated for August. That show already includes Jeremy Telemantes of the the Art Critique Comedy Show duo. Sip on Santa Clara Valley Brewing’s beers and enjoy a midweek laugh.

Pick Your Poison
Tue, 7:30pm, $10+
Santa Clara Valley Brewing, San Jose

Like his contemporaries, Marc Maron and Louis C.K., stand-up comic Bill Burr cracks up audiences with brutally honest observations about the loathsome, heaving mass of selfishness and vapidity otherwise known as “humanity.” But unlike Maron, who finds punchlines (and dejection) in the realization that he is no different than everyone else, and C.K., who works to tease out the transcendent beauty in all the cruelty and barbarism that surrounds him, Burr grabs laughs through sheer callousness and resignation. The titles of his two most recent Netflix specials say it all: You People Are All The Same and I’m Sorry You Feel That Way.

Need more proof? Within minutes of taking the stage in for the 2014 filming of I’m Sorry, Burr wastes no time in offering up a grim solution to global warming and pollution. “They just don’t want to come out and say it,” he says—referring to hand-wringing politicians and scientists. “Nobody has the balls to come out and say it—and say, ‘Look, 85 percent of you have to go!”

But that’s not the real Burr. Speaking over the phone, the 47-year-old comedian from Canton, Mass., insists that the person his fans see on stage isn’t him. “When I’m doing someone yelling, it’s not me yelling,” he says. “I’m usually doing a character.”

Fair enough. Still, the characters Burr inhabits on stage are quite often angry—or befuddled, exasperated, scared and genuinely bothered by something.

If all of his most hyped-up gesticulations and raised voices are deployed when he is in character, then the actual Burr must look and sound a bit more like the smug, punishingly pragmatic man who drops out of an imitation of Donald Sterling, mid-racist rant, to directly address those who were so outraged by the behavior of the Los Angeles Clippers owner: “What did you think they thought?” Burr says, smirking in bemusement. “You never talked to a grandparent and asked the wrong question and all of a sudden went down this crazy road?”

Which isn’t to say Burr would ever stand behind Sterling’s statements. He is clearly a progressive dude. But Burr’s is not a progressivism born from a liberal arts education at Harvard. His is a “you do you and I’m gonna do me” streetwise progressivism, born of a sharp eye, a sharper mind and a perpetual skepticism for authority.

When asked what he enjoys most about stand-up comedy, he says it is the freedom from such influences that keeps him coming back. And in the process of explaining his love of performing he ends up weaving as eloquent a takedown of income inequality as any presidential speech writer or studied Marxist professor could ever hope to produce.

“I’m using my talent for me—the money is going to go to me,” he says. “All business is set up so the big guy owns it, and it all goes to the big guy, and he tells you what you earned. And that’s just a recipe for getting screwed.”

Bill Burr performs at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts on Jun. 22 at 7pm. More info.

“Nobody should ever listen to anything I say,” says Jon Hendren, a man with 78,000 followers on Twitter under the handle, @fart.

I’m one of those 78,000. For more than a year, I’ve subscribed to Hendren’s tweets. He publishes about five or six a day, along with a dozen or so replies to other users, covering an absurd range of topics. In easy succession, he’ll praise the comedic gall of David Letterman, then mock Apple Pay, then pitch “Chili Lite” as a new food.

He is sincerely ironic, rivetingly trivial and humbly disrespectful.

The first time I saw him in public, it took me a second to remember the face from his stoic online portrait. The man behind this rollicking virtual presence sat quietly on Caltrain, staring out the window and sipping a dark beer. When he glanced at his phone, it felt both important and completely inconsequential.

Offline, Hendren is a tall, but otherwise normal and unassuming human being. He gives no hint of his hyperactivity on social media. He’s the sleepy river above a waterfall.

“His Twitter account makes him seem a bit more manic than he really is in person,” says Hendren’s friend, David Thorpe (@arr). “He’s a combination of low-key and giddy. When he starts giggling, he won’t stop.”

“The stuff that really makes him laugh is little concepts,” adds Hendren’s long-time friend, boss and landlord, Greg Pollock. Pollock is responsible for a wife, two kids and @weedguy420boner, an account followed by 19.6k people.

The jokes that the trio trickle out 140 characters at a time have been tossed under the wide umbrella of “Weird Twitter.” Like anything cool, this online community is now repped by hundreds of people who these three guys find insufferable. Still, it is a concise description. Their comedy parodies all the worst people on the Internet while folding in wonky observations and “little concepts.”

“It’s a pretty accurate representation of my personality,” Hendren says. “In a lot of ways it’s over-the-top, but there is a lot of me in there. Like, I do listen to Taylor Swift every night before bed.”

The tweets have separated these men on the most relevant social media site operating today, which currently boasts 974 million accounts—some of those are inactive, but still.

“Twitter is just a feed of perspectives that updates really quickly, so it’s really apparent what’s boring,” says Pollock. “And sorting out what’s boring quickly, is what results in things becoming weirder, faster.”

And, things have gotten weird. But, Hendren, the most active member of the trio, was always a bit off.

“Jon has the sense of humor of an alien who fell to earth or something,” says Thorpe. “He’s really funny, but in a completely different way than anyone else that I’ve ever met. He’ll get fixated on things that don’t really seem funny, but through force of will he’ll make them funny.”

Hendren started using Twitter back in 2008. He registered as user number “14 million something.”

“I used to carry around a little black book, way back in the day,” Hendren says. “It wasn’t filled with phone numbers. It was filled with half-jokes that I would think up throughout the day, because I would write for SomethingAwful later that week.”

SomethingAwful was an early internet destination with content that smacks of the humor that Clickhole and The Onion now dominate. David Thorpe also contributed with a music column named “Your Band Sucks.”

“Back then, there wasn’t a ton of humor writing on the internet,” Thorpe says. “And, I’m not going to overstate it, but I think there’s no question (SomethingAwful.com) was somewhat influential. It’s also somewhat of its time.”

The site was a meeting ground for writers and readers to joke around. “Your Band Sucks” started as a forum that landed Thorpe a position as a writer. But, times were different.

“People now are used to the Internet being a wellspring of negativity,” he says. “Back then people were more committed to their fandoms in a way that could be riled up easy. But still, to this day, I’m getting emails about an article that I wrote on Tool ten years ago. I’m not kidding.”

Neither Hendren nor Thorpe still work for SomethingAwful, which has broadened in scope as a meeting ground for anyone passionate about almost anything. But, Hendren would eventually shift from using his little black book to putting his half-jokes up on Twitter, one of the first apps to be mobile optimized.

“Stuff like ‘Ass Viper,’ like, it’s funny, but not funny enough to be a full joke,” he says. “So instead of carrying a book around, I would text it to myself on Twitter, and then I could get on my laptop later and look at all this stuff. Kinda like a notebook.”

When Hendren’s formerly private musing became public, he attracted a following. Then, for kicks, he began to test out the capabilities of the still gestating app.

“I think I realized, ‘Oh my god, this is my life now,’ when the Smash mouth egg thing occurred,” he says.

The Smash Mouth egg thing started when Hendren realized he could interact directly with the San Jose native band. Every night, for weeks, he tweeted to the band, asking them to meet him downtown, where he would pay the lead singer $20 to eat a bunch of eggs. The band was not amused, but lots of people were. When Smash Mouth challenged Hendren to reach $10,000, other users began matching Hendren’s offer. The stunt raised $14,000 for St. Jude’s Hospital.

The fundraising gave the band no choice and brought aboard bleached-tipped chef, Guy Fieri, who prepared the eggs as a promotion for the opening of his restaurant. Fieri, famously, hates eggs.

Steve Harwell, lead singer of Smash Mouth, points at a plate of scrambled eggs, while Hendren smirks in satisfaction.

“They ended up eating the eggs,” Hendren says. “Well, most of them. They were kinda jerks. They weren’t in on it. They didn’t get it. They just felt obligated because of all the money for charity.”

Metro reached out to a representative of the band seeking comment on “the Smash Mouth egg thing,” but received no response.

Recognizing the startlingly personal access given by Twitter, Hendren attracted Thorpe to the site.

“Once we found we could use it primarily to goof around, instead of ‘here’s my breakfast,’ that’s when it became interesting to me,” says Thorpe. “Especially when it became part of the cultural conversation, and you could make fun of celebrities and bands to their faces, digitally speaking. I think Jon saw its potential a little earlier than a lot of people did.”

The app provided a welcome distraction when Hendren and Thorpe worked together for a game developing company named Gaia.

“It was sort of a strange job, that towards the end was slowing down quite a bit. So, we ended up with a fair amount of free time to just goof off and be idiots,” says Thorpe. “We would do all these bizarre things. Like, sending Pitbull to Alaska, that was the product of a really bored day at work.”

Thorpe, who was a music writer for the Boston Phoenix at the time, was digging through a press release aggregator that “nobody in the world cared about,” when he came across a promotion between Pitbull and Walmart. Pitbull was sponsoring a caffeinated breath strip and he promised to go to the Walmart location with the most likes on Facebook.

“This was completely exploitable,” Thorpe recalls, “so we started looking for good Walmart stores to send him. I was looking through the locations in Alaska, and when I found the one on this island, Kodiak, I just started laughing. It was so completely remote.”

Thanks in part to Hendren’s viral savvy, the Facebook page of the store blew up. It currently has 37,000 likes. The population of Kodiak is a little over 6,000. Thorpe was even flown up with Pitbull, who he described as “cordial and dapper.”

“Pitbull was cool,” Hendren said. “He was like ‘we’re gonna waste a day on this anyway, might as well do it in Alaska.’ But, the Walmart marketing people were very upset. They referred to us as ‘anti-establishment,’ which if you can get Walmart to call you anti-establishment, that’s pretty good.”

The ‘anti-establishment’ David Thorpe with Pitbull in Kodiak, Alaska.

Soon, Thorpe was put in charge of hiring another writer for Gaia’s content staff. Greg Pollock had just gotten his masters in Literature from UC Santa Cruz, and applied for the job. Thorpe liked his resume.

“I put ‘I quit selling weed’ as an accomplishment in college,” Pollock says. “So, when I went in for the interview Dave asked, ‘Can you get us weed?’ And I said, ‘No I quit.’ and he said, ‘Well, fair enough.’ They were really unprofessional and looked hungover.”

“Greg is sorta like the smart adult of the three of us,” Thorpe says. “He’s younger than me, but he’s a family man, a well-educated man. He’s like our dad.”

Hendren, Thorpe and Pollock would all eventually be let go from Gaia for non-Twitter reasons. But, Twitter helped them stay in touch, even as Thorpe moved from San Jose to San Francisco.

“It’s a good way to make fun of friends when you don’t live close together anymore,” says Pollock.

“Jon’s not gonna like this, but a while ago, he got a really dumb pair of shoes,” Thorpe says. “And Greg and I spent three days non-stop roasting him about his stupid shoes. And, that’s probably my favorite thing that happened on Twitter.”

“As soon as he put that picture up, you knew it was going to happen.” Pollock says. “If there was no Twitter, we’d just be sitting in our apartment making fun of his shoes for hours.”

Although they take shots at each other, they’re better at mocking the self-important phonies of the Twitterverse.

“Once you surround yourself with this irony, or whatever you want to call it,” Hendren says, “it becomes very obvious who is doing it for non-genuine reasons, like brands and people who are just being assholes.”

One of Hendren’s most notable clashes was with Buzzfeed. On Christmas day 2012, Hendren retweeted a collection of whines from children who did not receive the Apple product of their dreams. Buzzfeed turned the retweets into an article, without crediting Hendren.

“Retweets are tricky because you can’t really own them,” he says. “But, the curation was the work that I did. I mean, I was just laying around for a couple of hours searching. But, there was an amount of work that was done, and they used it. That’s kinda shitty.”

Matt Stopera, the reporter who wrote the “story,” still works at Buzzfeed, but not before Hendren’s call-out started an investigation into his work. Stopera would end up deleting roughly half his articles for containing plagiarized content.

“I don’t feel like I lost that one,” Hendren says.

Later, he butted heads with Wendy’s, after he mocked an exceptionally wack marketing campaign that had Boyz II Men sing love songs about their pretzel buns. Wendy’s then went to Contently, a website that will write nice things about your brand if you pay them.

“There were two or three paragraphs about how great their pretzels buns are, and then it showed my tweet, like out of the blue, and they called me a notorious brand troll,” Hendren says.

Chafing under the uncool label, Hendren asked Contently if he could respond to the mild slander. He was denied the opportunity because he wouldn’t pay.

But then, a strange wrinkle occurred when Wendy’s social media manager tweeted about having a Tinder connection fall through because her match recognized her from the battle with Hendren.

“It made me feel bad, or maybe weird, that she felt weird,” he says. “It’s a learning experience. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Well, anybody who doesn’t deserve it anyway.”

Hendren’s Twitter presence eventually landed him a job outside of the writing world. Scriptrock, a software company devoted to stopping configuration drift (system failures that result from updates), needed help generating buzz around a rather boring phrase.

“These guys emailed me out of the blue and told me about a marketing problem around this ‘DevOps’ term,” he says. “They asked if I wanted to come in and do their marketing. I was like, ‘Alright, y’know, I’ll just drop everything I’m doing and come work for you.’ ”

So, what is DevOps?

“It’s just making all your nerds talk to one another,” Hendren says. “Historically the ‘Devs,’ the engineers and the operations (Ops) guys don’t really talk. So, it’s kinda keeping it all in line.”

But, on his website, Hendren explains, “DevOps is the most important thing of all time. And I am the most important DevOps human. That makes me the most important person of all time.”

So, instead of selling this milquetoast idea, Hendren decided to invent a meglamaniac alter ego of a DevOps Thought Master, a.k.a. J-Bird, a.k.a. Pussy Falcon. It’s a funhouse mirror of the Silicon Valley types that take themselves a bit too seriously.

On his personal site, Hendren offers a DevOps certification class, right below the tagline, “The most stunning man…beautiful…passionate…perfect.”

In another strange twist, other Twitter users have begun to compliment Hendren in this exact same format: a bold declaration, followed by three outlandishly flattering adjectives. From time to time, Hendren retweets a few.

“It’s narcissistic, but I started searching for my own name because it’s really funny when it happens,” Hendren says. “I’m a giant idiot, the smallest stupidest things entertain me greatly.”

But, not everyone has been enamored with “Silicon Valley’s most influential thought leader.”

“There’s this community of actual thought leaders,” Hendren says, “and one of them came up to me and said, ‘You’re a big asshole,’ because I’ve been mocking them for like, months. Felt pretty good about that. It was the right kind of guy to call me that.”

Eventually, Hendren convinced Scriptrock to hire Pollock as his manager, so he wouldn’t have to “handle the spreadsheets.” It’s the third company where they’ve worked together. This time their goofing around is more encouraged.

“I’m in the middle of building the world’s largest trophy,” he said. “The current record holder is 34 feet 11 inches. So I’m doing 35 feet. It’s gonna ruin their day.”

The trophy is part of a giveaway for a website named Commandlinefu.com, which Hendren now administrates. The site is depository for helpful snippets of code, but, like DevOps, is stiflingly technical and a viral facelift from “The Internet’s Big Delightful Boy” might help it achieve wider fame.

The third head of the Weird Twitter cerberus, Thorpe, now works as a content developer for another mobile games company after tiring of the “hot take culture” of Internet writing.

And his days of pranking the Pitbulls of the world seem to be coming to a close. Unlike Hendren, he keeps cyberspace more separate from his work. Most of his co-workers don’t know he’s behind @arr which uses “Fountain,” Marcel Duchamp’s Dada opening statement, as the profile picture.

“I’m getting old. I don’t want to be as mean to everyone all the time,” he said. “I don’t want to associate my professional life with being that dude from the internet.”

And he doesn’t think much of his 18 thousand followers, though he did tempt Twitter with a picture of a shoe that his cat had mangled to achieve the milestone.

“I don’t feel like I have that many, and I don’t really care,” he says. “There’s people who are way funnier than me, and have like a third of the followers. It’s not something to be taken that seriously, especially when any hack comedian, or hack anybody, can buy followers. You could have 200,000 followers tomorrow.”

Similarly, Pollock has changed the tune of his account, which used to be more joke-centric, to “dad” humor riffs.

“Someone told me the BTK killer read an article about weird Twitter and he really liked Fred Delicious (Dildo Hitler at the time),” he says. “That made me reconsider my shit and kind of get away from weird Twitter jokes per se.”

But, at the same time, Pollock is glad that there’s a digital record of his younger thoughts, if his kids are ever curious.

“For stuff like ‘pussy look like a rolled up piece of ham,’ (referring to an old tweet) I wouldn’t say that to my mother at Thanksgiving,” he says. “But, I would not be ashamed to have my kid read that, in context of Twitter. They’ll have an idea of what Dad was like when he was 25 onwards.”

“I think Twitter is gonna stick around,” Hendren says. “It’s not like MySpace or Facebook; it’s a unique medium to disseminate information, that’s not easily gonna go away.”

Despite the lasting power of the app, and the trio’s sizable online presence, none of them take themselves seriously, at all.

“At the end of the day, we’re all sitting on our phones shouting platitudes at nobody,” Hendren says. “And, you can draw the most elaborate description, or write a think piece, but you’re just a guy on your couch.”

“I never feel like I have to say, ‘boy, racism is bad’ today,” Pollock says in agreement. “There are dozens, thousands of people all saying the same thing. It gets lost in the noise. You don’t always have to say something, especially when it isn’t adding anything.”

The three lack any immediate plans to turn their online act into anything physically performative. Rather, they seem to tweet, just because they like to tweet.

“My wife will make me a breakfast sandwich for the train, and it’s just a part of my day,” Pollock says. “I’ll look at it and be like, ‘Man, this is a dope sandwich. I’m gonna put it on Twitter.’ And that’s about it. There’s no real expectation that other people will enjoy it. I don’t know why people do.”

“We’re all very very normal,” Hendren says. “We’re all self-aware. We know how absurd it is, and just how horrific it is.”

Like many fledgling comics struggling to make a name for themselves in stand-up, Pablo Francisco worked the open mic scene hard. But not all would-be comedians have been fortunate enough to have the kind of secret weapon that Francisco stumbled upon one evening at a gentleman’s club.

It was there that Francisco met Candy Cantaloupes, a sweet and busty porn star, with whom he forged a platonic friendship—with benefits. Although Francisco says he never hooked up with Candy, she did ask the manager of the Improv comedy club in Brea, Calif., out on a date.

“She cancelled the night before (the date), but the manager was so nice to me after that,” Francisco says. “They started letting me open up for big acts. It’s a strange door, but it’s a good one.”

Francisco would likely have done just fine without Candy’s help. In a word, he’s a natural, and he is bringing his eccentric blend of unflinching, observational humor, spot-on impressions, and manic contortions to the San Jose Improv to ring in 2015 (he played on New Year’s Eve and performs tonight, Jan. 2, and tomorrow night, Jan. 3).

According to Francisco, he discovered his talent by mistake. “I got my start in comedy by accident,” he explains. “It was a hobby that turned into a career. I got fired from Domino’s pizza. After that, I saw the comedy club down the street.”

Francisco performed each Wednesday at the Improv comedy club in Tempe, Ariz., gradually building his set until a “What are you going to do with your life?” lecture from his father prompted him to test his stuff at a larger club.

“I went there and they just told me ‘Hey man, we think you can do this business’ and I was really blown away by it,” he says.

After a little help from his adult film star friend, Francisco further expanded his audience through the then-nascent power of online streaming media. “When YouTube came out, oh my God!” he exclaims. “Talk about life-changing.”

One his early online bits showcases Francisco’s fervent impersonation of an Indian karaoke king. In the same video, he drips sweat while unraveling the sexual implications of mariachi, country and R&B music with the passion of a Pentecostal preacher in front of a raucous crowd.

The video blew up, giving him worldwide exposure. After a couple days, his manager called him with shocking news: “You’re not going to believe this, but that YouTube thing sold 10,000 tickets in Sweden—in seven minutes.”

Francisco explains his popularity by impersonating a real Swedish fan that came up to him and said, “Television goes off at 9, 10 o’clock and no one has nothing to do so they go to the YouTube and watch comedians and so far you are the biggest one.”

He mimics an Australian who told him, “we can watch you any time we want, mate. We only got Oprah, Doctor Phil, and YouTube.” Then snapping back into his grateful, actual self, he says, “But that’s only over there.”

Francisco hasn’t achieved the same level of fame stateside, but he’s not complaining. “I’m in between—it’s a beautiful spot to be,” he says. “You make the money, but you can still go eat or shopping.”

As his career has progressed, Francisco has begun using his comedy for deeper purposes. “I don’t go out there and say ‘Hey, I’m Pablo, save the soldiers!’ But the money has helped people I’ve known who have been in bad positions,” he says.

In addition to visiting injured soldiers, he has volunteered with people with special needs and paid for a girlfriend’s cancer treatment. “That’s what it’s all about in a way,” Francisco says.

His newest material reflects his growing maturity. “We decided to write another hour of comedy, but this time do it differently,” he says. “Add video to it, add a little more electricity, make a show out of it, make it different, and then we’ll go back to same old formula. It’s a little like Steve Martin playing banjo, I guess.”

He has also been using his comedy increasingly to scrutinize the hypocrisy and poisonous nature of much of popular culture. During our interview he launches into an impression of Dog the Bounty Hunter: “We’re gonna go in there. We’re gonna get these guys and kick their ass! OK, Jesus? Thank you, Jesus. Amen.” He says with a laugh, “It’s contradictory stuff. … I think people need to wake up a little bit more, and I think comedy is the best way of doing that.”

Pablo Francisco will ring in the New Year, performing at the San Jose Improv on Dec. 31. More info.

Touted as Dave Chappelle’s biggest comedy comeback since retreating from the white-hot spotlight of his eponymous Comedy Central show eight years ago, the 15-city Live Nation-Funny Or Die Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival will put the reclusive entertainer in front of some of the largest audiences in standup history.

The tour, which kicked off last week before a crowd of 14,000 in Austin, comes to the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View on Sept. 20, where Chappell—armed with an arsenal of stories and American Spirit—will share a stage with Flight of the Conchords, Kristen Schaal, Aussie-born raconteur Jim Jefferies, roastmaster Jeff Ross, Bay Area transplant and Daily Show correspondent Al Madrigal, Demetri Martin, Chris D’Elia, Hannibal Burress, Brody Stevens and John Mulaney.

“I’m really excited to be working with Dave Chappelle and Flight of the Conchords and the other guys,” Jefferies, 40, says. “I’ve worked with Flight of the Conchords before, way back in England, so it will be good to see them again.”

http://youtu.be/q0zE14XxyKg

Jefferies, who moved from Australia to Los Angeles by way of London a few years ago, will perform at four of the tour’s West Coast stops, including Mountain View. The rest he can’t attend because he’s filming the second season of his show Legit, which reprises its run from FX to FXX next year.

“These will definitely be the largest audiences I’ve ever performed for,” says Jefferies, whose iconoclastic act has earned him a reputation as a dirty comic—and a storyteller, too, whose material, like Chappelle’s, grows less setup-punch jokey and more autobiographical with age.

“I’m super excited about the whole thing, mostly to play in front of that many people,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s going to look or feel. Normally before I do a gig, I’ll get there 20 minutes early to the show to get a feel for it and relax a bit. But here, I want to show up earlier in the day, hours earlier to wander around and take it all in. It’s going to be a new experience for me as much as anyone.”

Though TV filming has limited his standup show schedule to once or twice weekly, Jefferies actively writes new material all the time. His next hour-long special—even though he’s not sure where to film it and who will buy it—is already written.

“I talk a lot about what’s going on with my life,” says Jefferies, who met his girlfriend and mother to his first and only child, Hank, on the set of his show’s pilot, (when she played a hooker he hired for his wheelchair-bound friend to lose his virginity). “I hate to be pigeonholed as a dirty political comic or whatever they say I do, the things that I was doing in my 20s. I think I’d be a little childish doing that material now. It’s not fitting who I am these days. I just try to do what I find funny at the moment, and hopefully it relates to someone somewhere.”

To avoid falling into the trap of becoming famous enough to start writing jokes about being famous (like Ricky Gervais, for one), Jefferies has made a habit of actively seeking out or accepting situations that would lend themselves well to his act. So when his mom asked him to join her for a family cruise with a bunch of kooky relatives he fought his inclination to refuse and told her, sure, he’ll go. Enough hilarity shall ensue to make it worthwhile, he figures.

The beauty of the Oddball lineup is the diversity of talents, from storytellers like Jefferies and Chappelle to exaggerated personas like the ever-eccentric Schaal or the one-liner-happy Martin. Even in a massive arena, Ross is sure to deliver his quippy brand of insults to the audience (so those in the front row should be ready to get singled out).

A second stage will feature local acts for each metro market; the lineup for Shoreline’s auxiliary stage has yet to be announced. But each event comes accompanied by buskers, vendors, psychics and novelty acts.

Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival
Sept. 20, 5pm; Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View

After making it’s debut last year, the Think and Die Thinking music festival returns this weekend with two days of punk and indie music performed by bands with women, people of color and members of the queer and transgender communities.

Last year, Rich Gutierrez and Christine Tupou introduced the idea to San Jose with two days of music at the Billy DeFrank Center and one day of music Streetlight Records.

“It was a trial thing (last year),” Tupou says. “We didn’t quite know how it was going to go. We had never booked a fest before. It went better than we expected.”

This year, the focus remains the same, but they’ve made a few changes, like hosting all three days at the Billy DeFrank Center.

Though, last year wasn’t without its problems. They were faced with some last-minute band cancellations, plus several local bands got upset that they weren’t allowed to play, not fully understanding the mission of the festival. According to Tupou, women, people of color and members of the queer and transgender communities are underrepresented at punk and indie shows and therefore don’t always feel comfortable there. They wanted to do their part to help to change that.

“There’s always going to be those few people that are mad because they can’t play a fest,” Tupou says. I felt personally responsible for telling each and every one of those people why we were doing this. At the end of the day it’s a pride thing. I think it was good to have full disclosure and be really transparent of what our intentions were. The mission statement still rings true because we’re still making space for people in San Jose that don’t really feel comfortable at shows and don’t get to see people like themselves on stage playing music.”

This year the organizers decided, while still staying steadfast to their original mission statement, to book a broader range of artists including non-punk bands, performance artists and comedians.

“I want to expand the fest as much as possible,” Tupou says. “I want to keep the theme punk and indie, but I want to show people you don’t have to limit yourselves to one form of art. You don’t have to play punk. You can get a drum machine and play that kind of music and still hang out with punks. It’s making room for anything that you don’t usually see and sometimes you don’t even know you want to see, other than when you see it it’s completely insightful and inspiring.”

Think and Die Thinking is August 24 to August 26 at the Billy DeFrank Center. Tickets are $7-$10. More info.

If his show at Mountain Winery last night taught us anything, it’s that nobody has followed Weird Al’s career like Weird Al.

The guy must have a hell of a clipping service, because he seems to have collected every single pop culture reference to him ever made, for use in his “ALTV” between-song video montages. In some cases, he’s even incorporated them into the set, as when a Jeopardy question about “White and Nerdy” Segway immediately into Al busting out onto the stage in his trademark segue for the song.

What’s even crazier is that when I saw him a few years back in San Mateo, he used just as many pop-culture clips about himself, and yet most of them were entirely different than the ones he showed last night. Is the guy secretly on everybody’s mind all the time, or what?

Well, kind of. I mean, who doesn’t love Weird Al? And what person alive the last three decades doesn’t recognize him as a cultural touchpoint of some type? Whether your generation rocked to “My Bologna,” “Eat It,” “Fat,” “Amish Paradise” or “White and Nerdy,” you know Weird Al.

Seeing him live is like a two-hour study in why he’s remained a trending topic in the back of our minds for this long. First of all, his parodies are, for a huge chunk of the show, cut down into a medley blitz, featuring about the first two-three minutes of each. And that’s always the most clever part, isn’t it? I really only need the first verse and chorus from his Rocky-meets-deli “Eye of the Tiger” parody, “The Rye or the Kaiser.” Now, when I was 10, it might have been a different story, but now that’s perfect. Same with the Backstreet Boys parody “EBay,” his REM “Stand” take-off “Spam” and the “La Bamba” parody “Lasagna”—all of which he ran through quickly.

The true fan favorites (and most elaborate costume changes) got the full-song treatment, though: both MJ parodies, “Amish Paradise,” the stormtrooper-staffed encore for his Star Wars-themed parodies of “American Pie” (which I have to admit has grown on me over the years) and “Lola.” Plus, more recent songs like the Lady Gaga parody “Perform Like This,” the Taylor Swift re-imagining “TMZ” and his version of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.,” “Party in the C.I.A.”

Second, it hit me last night how annoying it is when other artists who do musical comedy try to distance themselves from Weird Al by saying “Well, he’s a parodist,” as if this allowed them to look down on him in some way. Actually, he’s quite a brilliant comedian even when he’s not parodying songs, as his fake video interviews showed again last night. Editing himself into interviews of various celebrities made for some hilarious absurdist comedy.

Lastly, Weird Al, against all odds, still has the ability to surprise. He opened his set last night with Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio.” Not a parody of it, mind you, but the actual song, done in all seriousness. Seriousness? Now, that’s just weird.