By Stuart Nulman
When I first saw comedian Demetri Martin perform at the Just For Laughs festival back in 2006, I was intrigued. In fact, I was intrigued how his minimalist comic observations were so way out from left field, that they not only made a lot of sense, they also brought out a lot of laughs from the audience.
Two years ago, Martin proved that he can be just as funny with the printed word. When his book “This IS A Book By Demetri Martin”, a collection of his best written comic observations, it became a New York Times best seller. And now Martin has proven that he can be just as funny with illustrations, as he recently released a companion volume called “Point Your Face At This”.
The book is collection of drawings by Martin (many of which have been displayed as part of his live act), which simply (and effectively) illustrated the style of minimalist, yet sensible humour that he is identified with.
These drawings are not complex nor complicated. They use simple lines and shapes to convey the humourous message that Martin wants to impart on the reader. And Martin succeeds greatly with the illustrations that make up this book. In fact, it’s almost like it is recapturing the spirit of the “droodles”, a series of nonsense drawings that became a huge fad – not to mention a best-selling book — during the 1950s (it’s best known drawing was the two semi-triangles over a straight line with the caption “ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch”).
The book is fun to flip through, as the drawings that are featured in it will have you simultaneously nodding your head in agreement and laughing out loud.
For example, there’s a bat-shaped umbrella that’s entitled “Batman’s umbrella”; a Venn Diagram with the circles labeled “candy” and “maracas”, and the middle section of the diagram labeled “Tic Tacs”; there’s a pictured of a four-holed button with the caption “Button or Disappointing pepperoni pizza”; an Eskimo making an igloo with blocks made in an ice cube tray; and Martin’s tribute to the droodle: a small diagonal line on the upper left hand corner of the page with the caption “unfinished drawing of porcupine in grassy field during rainstorm”.
“Point Your Face At This” is another vivid example of how multi-talented Demetri Martin is as a stand-up (and sit-down) comedian. Not many of his contemporaries have that ability to be funny using the spoken word, printed word and illustrations, which makes Martin such a rare jewel in this rich gold mine that is the stand-up comedy world today.
This review originally appeared in the July 27, 2013 edition of The West End Times.
