He may not be your typical joke-spouting comic, but Demetri Martin's laid-back, Mitch Hedberg-style observational humor is definitely laugh-worthy. ("An ex-girlfriend is the same as an OK movie. I liked it at the time but I don't want to see it again. Especially if the movie is kind of a bitch.") The Yale graduate dropped out of law school six years ago to take up comedy full time, and his resume seems to confirm he's headed in the right direction. He won the prestigious Perrier Comedy Writing Award at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2003; wrote for NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brian from 2003 to '04; and was featured in his own Premium Blend special on Comedy Central, which included a mishmash of traditional stand-up, prop comedy with humorous drawings as visual aids, and musical comedy with previously recorded content played on a boombox and accompanied by his live guitar-strumming and clever, expertly timed remarks. See him perform this Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Oct. 22, 8 p.m., Ferguson Hall-TBPAC, downtown Tampa, $30.75, 813-229-7827, www.tbpac.org.
This article appears in Oct 18-24, 2006.