I ended up ‘covering’ a ‘story’ about something ‘everyone’ already knows about: UCB is fun and cool. It was fun and cool.

Capital NY:

Fred Armisen is a canny demythologizer of things as cutesy as having a tap-dance troupe performing in a hip comedy club. “Portlandia” is essentially based around making light fun of just such young-white-liberal tropes (along with pickling, bike culture, dumpster diving, and on and on). His act was also musical, though it was also the most experimental performance, most in keeping with Bhonik’s initial orientation. He went through a few impressions: someone waiting in line at a hotel listening to muzak; the first person to be really into doo wop; a fox decomposing in “fast motion.”

“I am not a fan of jazz music,” he said. “Let’s talk about it, because you are also not a fan of jazz music!” At that he queued up some hard bop, acted bored. That one kind of tanked, but his charisma carried the audience. He finished out his set with a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” poorly played on purpose, a sort of inverse of his old character Jens Hannemann’s “Complicated Drum Technique.” It was hard to determine exactly why playing the cover poorly worked so well—Armisen seems to have a sort of sixth sense for comedy-through-music—but it had the crowd in stitches.