Juvenile stoner shtick: It works
Few would label comic T.J. Miller a master of understatement, but he almost qualifies in one brief moment in his hour-long HBO standup special airing Saturday, June 17. Standing disheveled, unkempt, his rumpled clothing soaked in water he’s dribbled all over himself, the departing co-star of “Silicon Valley” deadpans, “I don’t know if you can tell it or not, but I’m a handful.”
“T.J. Miller: Meticulously Ridiculous,” filmed at Denver’s Paramount Theater, veers wildly from being very funny, to sounding like a stoner’s meandering journey through topics only he finds funny, to stuff you’d expect to hear from a 12-year-old. Actually, make
that stuff you’d expect to hear from a 12-year-old stoner-in-training.
But the secret to Miller’s comedy is that despite his stage appearance and frequent use of the stoner slur, Miller skillfully weaves outright erudition into his routine. Not to get all highfalutin, but there’s a kind of neo-dada quality to his riff on the made-up word “smerd.”
“Ever heard of it?” he asks. “That’s if you smell something a nerd heard.”
Ridiculous? Of course, but kind of genius at the same time.
Elsewhere in the show, he waxes comically eloquent on peanut butter, imagining how George Washington Carver realized he’d created something so valuable, he had to keep it all to himself. He wouldn’t even tell his wife what he’d created. As the routine goes on, with Miller voicing both Carver and his wife, peanut butter begins to sound like a controlled substance.
The admission to his being a handful comes as he talks about his longsuffering wife’s reaction to his buying an Asian battle ax from a shop in Philadelphia. He then produces the weapon while telling a story about how a local constable’s reaction to a crazy-looking, Brillohaired dude walking down the street swinging a weapon of war around in the air.
Miller has obvious appeal to fans of his Erlich Bachman character on “Silicon Valley,” but as loopy as he can be in his standup, there is sly method to his comic madness. As he careens from riff to riff, the one thing he avoids, at least in “Meticulously Ridiculous,” is topical comedy of the political variety.
For that, if nothing else, T.J. Miller offers welcome comic relief.