The second season of Demetri Martin’s Comedy Central sketch show, Important Things with Demetri Martin premieres tonight at 10 pm. EST. Last year, the series debut broke network records as it became the highest rated premiere since Chapelle’s Show came on the scene in 2003. Get primed by checking out a few minutes of the new season below. And feel free to come back to this space after the show tonight to let us know what your impressions were. Enjoy.

Want to know where Demetri was in 2005? Check out our interview with him from the Punchline Magazine archives.

It looks like Zach Galifianakis will once again be lending his considerable talents to the big screen, this time in the Paul Rudd comedy Will, reports Variety. The industry publication says that Zach is in negotiations to star in the flick, which is being headed up by Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

Variety reports that the “story centers on an ordinary guy (Rudd) who lives in a world where people’s lives and destinies are being written by scribes in Heaven. The man wakes up one day to find that his heavenly writer has decided to no longer draft his life, and he must go about his day unscripted.”

The movie comes from the mind of Demetri Martin, who sold the script to DreamWorks in 2006; since then, Paramount took control and will now be producing the flick.

This will be the second Rudd as teamed up with Galifianakis; the pair filmed Dinner with Schmucks, which is set to premiere July 23.

Good news, comedy nerds! The Jeff Dunham Show’s successful first season completed without your foretold apocalypse coming to pass. And more importantly, Comedy Central has announced the return of Demetri Martin and Sarah Silverman’s respective shows beginning Feb. 4th. Both are two of the network’s more successful original programs: Important Things with Demetri Martin received the channel’s highest audience ever for a premiere (until The Jeff Dunham Show), and this past season of The Sarah Silverman Program garnered Silverman an Emmy nomination Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Important Things with Demetri Martin will air Thursdays at 10 pm, followed by The Sarah Silverman Program at 10:30 pm.

Ahhh, Demetri Martin. We remember just a few short years ago when Punchline Magazine had just launched in 2005 watching Demetri perform in small backrooms in the East Village of New York City in front of 75 people. Now, we’re giving away three copies of a DVD for a TV show in which he is the star. We love it when good things happen to good comedians.

That’s right, folks, we’re giving away three copies of the first season of Important Things with Demetri Martin, the highly popular Comedy Central show, which – as you may know – will be back for a second season. The DVD, out in stores and available here Sept. 8,  features deleted sketches, commentaries and maybe most importantly a poster and stickers. C’mon! When was the last time you got a poster of anything? Right? Tell us this isn’t exciting. 

Ok, so the first three people to email us at contest@punchlinemagazine.com with their full name and address AND a photo of them enjoying Punchline Magazine will get themselves a copy of the DVD. You have to be ok with us posting said photo here on the blog section as well as your name and town. If you’ve won anything from us in the last six months, you are not eligible. That’s all. Good luck!

Sticking a modern, Comedy Central-reared comedian with the “quirky” label has become something of an ironic cliche. In the case of Demetri Martin, however, cliche is the last description that could ever be comfortably affixed.

Performing on May 15 sans opening act at the Royal Oak Music Theater (a few miles outside of Detroit; a hipster hotbed if ever there was one), Martin’s definition of peak form includes a rather large injection of wacky, off-beat one-liners; intermittent ad-libbing; and no shortage of the earnest-faced, eager-to-please boyish candor that both charms and disarms, simultaneously.

Given the high caliber quality of Martin’s purposefully awkward stage presence, it’s not hard to see why he would have become the comedy poster boy for legions of collegiate Death Cab for Cutie Worshipers; the spokesman for a generation fed on a steady diet of social uncertainty and distrust.

Beginning with a stint as a correspondent for The Daily Show, the former law school student – he dropped out of NYU just a year before graduating to pursue a career in comedy – has since gained a healthy level of fame and notoriety as the star of his own lauded show, Important Things with Demetri Martin, just picked up for a second season. With his knack for an unusual marriage of prop, musical, and a Steven Wright-esque setup-punch line cadence, Martin has become perhaps one of the most sought after mop-tops since the Fab Four themselves.

On stage, it’s no surprise that Martin delivers exactly what he promises. At one point, the affable jokester even took requests from the audience while strumming and humming a guitar and accompanying harmonica, betraying a nice-guy realism transcending any kind of transparent comedic persona. Aside from the usual memorable jokes and crowd pleasing fare, perhaps the show’s best moment came at its close, when Martin returned not for an encore, but to field questions from slightly tipsy audience members.

Old favorites were delivered in spades, but Martin never shied away from taking the reins into uncharted territory: a rookie mistake that, in less capable hands, could easily spell doom and disaster for a fledgling comedy career. With relative ease, Martin relayed an effortless rapport off of hecklers and cheerers alike, controlling the atmosphere from beginning to end, without his trademark hesitation.

Love him or hate him – many an irony-challenged folk are quick to dismiss Martin as a one-note joke – it’s hard not to fall for the wink-and-smile creativity that is Martin’s act and character. Sometimes, it’s best to just lie back and surrender to the quirkiness.

With the amount of buzz Demetri Martin has created this year, Comedy Central would have been nuts not to have re-upped Important Things with Demetri Martin. So, it’s no surprise that’s exactly what they did.

Entertainment Weekly reports:

The sketch comedy series, which was the network’s most-watched series premiere since Chappelle’s Show, averaged 2.8 million total viewers its first season and ranked first in its time slot across all of television in the hard-to-reach Men 18-34 demographic.

In addition to the second season of Martin’s show premiering in early 2010, the comedian will also be seen in Ang Lee’s new flick Taking Woodstock this August. He’s also been recently cast opposite Brad Pitt in Moneyball.

To this day, Mitch Hedberg is one of the most imitated comedians around. If you’ve been to more than one open mic you’ve provably seen a comic copying his style of accented, percussive speaking; sometimes good, usually terrible. I know that for my part I’ve heard a lot of comics telling bizarre one-liners they must have thought sounded Hedbergian.

But what is usually missing is the strong underlying logic that Mitch employed when constructing his jokes. And while he certainly made it seem natural and off the cuff, almost all of Mitch’s jokes were founded on a solid logical foundation.

To look at one example, let’s take this joke of Mitch’s:

“Every Book is a children’s book, if the kid can read.” (Album: Mitch All
Together, Track: “Saved by the Buoyancy of Citrus,” Time in: 00:27)

It’s a great joke, and it certainly comes out in Mitch’s voice. But consider the following two jokes:

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.” – Steven Wright
(Steven Wright Live, Video, Time 9:00)

“Every fight is a food fight when you’re a cannibal.” — Demetri Martin
(Album: These are Jokes, Track: “The Remix,” Time in: 01:41)

These jokes all follow the same progression:

“Every X is a Y (where Y is a type of X) under condition Z”

For this to work, condition Z has to be something possible, but unexpected given the standard interpretation of phrase Y; essentially Z makes X a Y, but given a non-standard reading of Y. The frequency of Zs occurrence (and therefore how often X actually is a Y) varies, from fairly often (a kid can read), to hopefully not all that often (a cannibal), but this feature isn’t really significant for the joke to work.

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