The Leno vet made his Letterman debut Friday, May 17, the week he began his month-long run of Born a Crime at the same Off-Broadway room that tested both Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me and Colin Quinn’s Long Story Short. The diverse, rowdy crowd of 125 clapped and whooped at his mention of various African countries and fish-out-of-water experiences (“Zambia is a very conservative country,” Noah was once cautioned by a guide. “So while you are here, don’t be gay.”), but it was his impressions of people encountered throughout his extensive travels that received the loudest response.

The subdued, soft-spoken 29-year-old possesses an uncanny ear for accents and languages (he currently speaks six), and is able to lovingly skewer the reactions he invokes in wary white Southerners, Mexicans who mistake him as one of their own, perky West Coast blondes who help him fill out bank forms, and black New York comedians who rely on cursing and boundless energy to sell questionable punchlines.

While Noah treads no new territory as a mimic, his unique history and outlook ensure his hour-long one-man show remains highly engaging. He didn’t venture to the United States, he explains, for clichéd notions of wealth and fame. In his version of the American Dream, “I came to America because I wanted to be black.” Formerly lacking any racial identity and referred to as “mutt,” “mixed breed,” “half-caste” or “colored,” in America, those of mixed descent who achieve success (Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Barack Obama), “get upgraded to black,” which goes a long way in explaining why he doesn’t mind when flyover natives refer to him as “nigger.” And as a comedian, his admission that his Swiss-German father doesn’t think much of his career choice—dismissing him as a literal clown—hints that there’s a wealth of material outside of racial observations that he has yet to tap.

Noah is a thoughtful, deliberate, magnetic storyteller with one-of-a-kind perspectives and big goals of fostering understanding and harmony. But like Russell Peters or Gabriel Iglesias, he runs the risk of sacrificing clever, original joke-writing on the altar of broad appeal. Now that he resides in Los Angeles, boasts a full tour slate and is deliberately courting industry recognition with July appearances at Just For Laughs Montreal, will Noah bridge the gap from “talented performer” to “widely admired stand-up comedian”? If his proven drive and fearlessness are any indication, it’s merely the latest in a series of gray areas from which he’ll emerge via a path of his own making.

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Trust Your Heart

Like fellow storytellers David Sedaris and Mike Birbiglia, Shillue possesses a wealth of anecdotes to dust off the shelf and present to an audience. His enthusiasm and energy hold attention, but he changes course far too often before reaching any sort of climax.

Trust Your Heart weaves together true-life stories—creating a pizza delivery service in his dorm room, singing in a barbershop quartet, a love interest turning tragic and a magician who performs his own unique disappearing act—and is divided into two tracks, “Don’t Trust Your Eyes” and “Don’t Trust Your Ears.” The first opens with Shillue referencing a Boston street that (without explanation) reminds him of Muammar Gaddafi, then entering Emerson College as a reluctantly celibate student (Gaddafi returns, very briefly in track two, 28 minutes later), then he’s upselling pizzas, then joining a comedy troupe, then a barbershop quartet, then recalling what “gay” meant in high school…

It’s not that Shillue introduces these story fragments and never returns to them. But by the time he does your aural plate is full of so many excess appetizers you’ve forgotten the details, and the effort required to juggle all these variables doesn’t pay off when he finally rejoins the splintering trails.

About seven minutes into the album, Shillue makes reference to witnessing “the gayest thing ever,” but then becomes sidetracked by anecdotes of closeted students. Twenty minutes later, after we’ve learned about several other unrelated adventures and characters, what gem of a plot-twist have we been waiting for? Opening the door on a fellow entertainer in a storm, asking “Who’s there?” and hearing “A faggot in the rain. What’s it to you?”

Another storyline involves a girl named Nicole, who toward the end of the second track serves as the hinge of a truly huge plot twist. Problem is, it’s buried under other occurrences and people and commentary. Instead of running with this engaging storyline, Shillue pivots yet again, closing the album with a very detailed account of a magician’s big hoax. (The magician isn’t even introduced until twenty-two minutes into this thirty-six minute album.)

Many of these fragments could have made decent stories if they’d been told separately. The album isn’t without its clever moments, like “There are gays in high school now. In the Seventies there were no gay students, just four or five profoundly sad students.” But overall, listening to Trust Your Heart is the comedic equivalent of watching a mouse navigate a maze. Eventually you just want to help him find his way out.

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So while his original appeal stemmed from shock value and bizarre low comedy, underlying it all is a fine mind that crafts witticisms and anecdotes that unfurl seamlessly on stage. But Waters is not a gut-busting standup or storyteller, although he still won regular laughs from a packed house at the refurbished, re-opened Howard Theatre in Washington, DC.

Some fans missed the first part of his 90-minute show because Waters was inadvertently rushed onstage a half hour before his 8 p.m. start time. Yet he remained unmistakable: sporting a checkerboard suit, bow tie and his trademark pencil-thin mustache, commenting in his sardonic, understated way about a subculture of gay men who display explicit online photos of the results of anal fisting. “It’s called blossoming,” he said dryly. “You can Google it,” but he doubted we’d want to.

It was a reminder that no matter how many elevated circles Waters travels in—including serving on the Cannes Film Festival jury—he remains familiar with the oddities and dark corners of “this filthy world” in a way few other artists know. With 95 percent brand-new material, though, his delivery occasionally seemed rushed. Yet he didn’t lean on bad taste in behind-the-scenes tales of his film career or acerbic commentaries on political correctness and social trends. At one point, in talking about his film Cry Baby, Waters lamented the disappearance of true rebel role models: “What are you today, a hacktivist? You’re sitting home in your parent’s house, they’re leaving food outside the door, and you’re shutting down the governments of three countries. The problem is that there’s no style about it…except poor posture.”

That’s a bon mot worthy of Oscar Wilde. But only Wilde’s unlikely heir would dare to describe a hairy gay man—”I thought his back was a hedge,” Waters quipped—in Provincetown for “Bear Week”  pushing along a “completely retarded” ( he apologized before using the term) 12-year-old girl in a baby carriage. “Was she having fun at Bear Week? Diane Arbus would have run from this photo,” he observed. “Then I had this terrible thought in my mind: Was she his ‘dick magnet’ for the weekend? I can’t stop thinking about it—and I hope you can’t either.” No matter how respected these days, Waters still proudly wears his crown as the “Pope of Trash.”

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This is not a standard, chronological biography. Cohen takes some liberties with the timeline, moving forward and back to further draw out his thesis. The result is a scattered and somewhat flawed narrative, but one that focuses on Sherman and his efforts to mix English and Yiddish in popular song parodies, a sort of Trojan Horse designed to bring Jewish culture into the mainstream.

Sherman was a wit early on, possibly a defense mechanism (as the common theory about comedians goes) to protect him from parents who were at best ambivalent about his existence. His father was absent, the family moved frequently, and Sherman never got much of a chance to settle into a normal life. That created an adult with an idealized picture of childhood and heightened sense of lust and gluttony. He was a neglectful father and husband. And until he lost his TV show, I’ve Got a Secret, he could even be lazy about his work. Then he changed gears and pushed hard, probably too hard for some of his TV co-workers. That’s when he finally broke through with My Son, the Folk Singer, recorded in 1962.

Many of Sherman’s contemporaries were Jewish, but they didn’t emphasize it in their work. Ethnicity was discouraged during World War II in favor of a homogenous “Americanism.” Sherman, Cohen asserts, turned that idea on its head by writing parodies that reinserted ethnicity into the songs. It’s an interesting thesis, begging a question not necessarily answered here. To what extent is an artist obligated to show his or her ethnicity in their work?

Cohen’s prose isn’t perfect. There are general quotes with no attribution to source material. On page 47, he discusses rising anti-Semitism and writes broadly, “college Jews avoided those ‘who were too stereotypically “Jewish” in manner or appearance.’” If the phrase hasn’t come from a specific source, why put it in quotes? And some stories are brushed aside with few details. After Sherman’s mother died, Allan’s half-brother and half-sister searched for their father, Dave. The half-sister talks about “one amusing story” from that time concerning finding money in a closet, but readers get no details about where the story took place or why it was amusing.

But Cohen gets cooking after the first 100 pages, when Sherman breaks through as a parodist. He’s able to put Sherman firmly in the context of his time, recreating the art, culture and politics of the age. His conclusions are sometimes debatable, but isn’t that the point of a book like this in the first place?

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Adam Cayton-Holland, Andrew Orvedahl, and Ben Roy are also enjoying a burst of national press in the wake of their Amazon pilot Those Who Can’t, based loosely on the characters from their FunnyOrDie.com series, so it would seem the ideal time to extend that promotional momentum with albums, tours and festival spots.

Orvedahl and Cayton-Holland’s new albums certainly come on the heels of all those things, and furthermore, they beg to be reviewed side by side: Hit the Dick Lights and I Don’t Know If I Happy share cover art (push them together to make a single picture, like a MAD magazine fold-in) and a release date (May 14th), and were recorded at the same venue on the same nights (Denver’s Bug Theatre, where The Grawlix runs its monthly show). Hell, the two guys even sport complementary beards.

Despite that, their styles remain unique. Orvedahl’s Hit the Dick Lights wastes no time launching into a joke about an irritating co-worker, flexing a rubbery, occasionally cartoonish voice that adds a sugary sting to the conversational tongue-lashings. It’s not so much jaded remove as the sound of our collective inner voice in a hyperactive bitch session with itself (see his brilliant joke about songs that fade out at the end, and how ridiculous that seems when applied to literature or dialogue).

Overdahl is the pseudo-manchild who derives endless pleasure from following mundane situations to their illogical conclusions, the kind of person you might notice glancing at you repeatedly on airplanes. Is he judging you based on your appearance, or what you’re reading? Yes and yes. Throw a dart at a random phrase (“sullen, corpulent bodies,” “juvenile vices,” etc.) and you’re also likely to hit some satisfyingly snappy wordplay. When it’s at its best, it’s reminiscent of Patton Oswalt or Bill Hicks, and the way they toe(d) the line between disappointed misanthropy and sarcastic smarm.

If Orvedahl is a smart guy living in a stupid person’s world, Cayton-Holland is the sensitive, learned dude surrounded by malfunctioning automatons and resigned to our eventual oblivion. His bits are more self-consciously honed than Orvedahl’s and often more soundbite-ready, sporting the dynamic inflection and grumbling disbelief of Kyle Kinane minus the sad-sack resignation. The perpetual agitation is more measured but no less sharp, as when he describes the failings of Montessori education or the implications of a message scrawled in wet concrete (hint: we’re doomed as a society).

He likes references but never leans on them too heavily. He’s harsh, but with flashes of silliness and the occasional self-aware groaner. And like Orvedahl, he’s so economical with his delivery that even his more-than-a-mouthful bits come off as lean and muscular. It’s the get-in, get-out professionalism of comics who have built their own scene instead of latching onto whatever preexisting one most fit their ideal personas.

These albums work free of context, but they’re especially strong when considered together. They aren’t so much two sides of the same coin as different denominations of the same currency, complementing each other by design but boasting inherent value and character of their own.

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On Nice Try, The Devil, Holmes’s first hour-long special and second recorded set, he displays the same goofy onstage persona and unique, lighthearted style that have allowed him to ascend to the top of the alternative scene, yet he pushes some of his material into darker, previously unspoken corners. When I saw Holmes a couple times last November at the New York Comedy Festival, I felt his comedic perspective was evolving—that some of his newer material was straying in both tone and intensity from that of his fantastic 2011 release, Impregnated with Wonder. And, as evidenced by Nice Try, the Devil, it has.

By his own account, now Holmes curses more frequently, punctuating many sentences with Carlinesque “fuck”s for effect. He’s also opening himself up more, discussing his internal dilemma over whether or not to believe in God, the despair he feels over not bedding a woman when it’s his night’s mission and how, no matter who his girlfriend has been, he’s always hated her friends.

But Holmes also preserves his trademark silliness, creating absurd real-life scenarios built around video game characters, informing us why the McDonald’s tagline is the worst thing one can say at a party and re-hashing his infamous “Pierce!” bit.

What’s striking about Holmes’s comedy is that even when he’s venturing into the more personal areas of his life, he doesn’t ever tone down the silliness. And he shouldn’t. Holmes is unapologetically silly, even referring to one of his own bits as “stupid.” Holmes’s two minutes of “Pierce!”, for example, are so painfully pointless that it’s uncertain why Holmes bothered to include it on a recorded set. But at the same time, who cares? It’s hilarious. A disingenuous comedian wouldn’t be able to pull off something that’s so utterly frivolous. Yet listening to Holmes shouting things that rhyme with someone’s name, it’s clear he’s just being himself. He’s having fun. Holmes’s onstage behavior is not clawing at listeners’ ears, begging for laughs. It’s a representation of the real person.

Holmes is starting to blow up. He’s had a popular podcast for a while now, he does voicework in big-time commercials, his Batman portrayal is superb, and he’ll soon have his own television show. Life’s going well for the 34-year-old. Holmes isn’t the kind of comic who regularly mines his soul-crushing sadness for audience amusement, but much of his comedy clearly derives from personal anxiety and self-image. To that end, it’ll be fascinating to see how his success affects his material going forward.

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There’s a predictable craziness to Gaffigan’s story. The idea of a comedian who, in his act, professes his love of sleep and hate for books writes a book essentially about giving himself five full-time jobs could be a sitcom plot. He’s the stereotypical dad who doesn’t quite know what’s going on, who defers to his wife, whose children are smarter than he is, who is utterly at odds with the concept of parenting. But that would be an unrecognizable stereotype to Gaffigan. He looks around and sees parents who know what they’re doing, who are—in his estimation—smarter, more patient, and more capable.

Examine Gaffigan’s stage act. He plays up the dumb, lazy guy image for laughs. Dumb, lazy comics don’t write the quality of material Gaffigan does, and they don’t tour and produce specials and CDs like he does. They also don’t take five kids on a tour bus, and neither does a stereotypically aloof parent. Gaffigan may feel overwhelmed, but part of his message is that all parents feel similarly. And every once in a while, when he watches some of those other “perfect” parents, he sees them lose it and scream at their kids, and it makes him feel a little better.

Fat reveals the seams between Gaffigan’s comic persona and his true personality. There’s plenty of material adapted from his act, including much from 2012 special Mr. Universe (“Disney,” “McDonald’s,” “Hotel Pools,” “Shoes,” “Photos,” and it was only “4 Kids” at the time). There’s the aforementioned bewildered dad. And there’s a bevy of bad puns. But there’s also the guy who wouldn’t trade anything for one of his kids’ smiles, and the guy who fawns over his wife even though she feeds them organic junk food.

Gaffigan even gets close to wistful in the final chapter, a fine balance of the battling real Jim and comic Jim, when discussing the phrase “You’re going to miss this.” He understands that the phrase is really “a confession from these parents with older children that may not have taken enough time to appreciate the chaos.” There’s insight and compassion in that observation, and a tacit acknowledgment that however much he might protest, he enjoys the chaos, even if he can’t help but throw in a punchline.

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Years of self-analysis, both on and off the air, have made Maron acutely aware of his motivations and flaws. This awareness goes a long way to making his trademark neurotic paranoia more palatable. “When life is scary and chaotic I like to make it more so,” he says matter-of-factly, recounting his decision to begin fostering cats one stressful, sleepless night. Aside from one chapter devoted to his childhood love of music, the book stays away from self-indulgence, instead focusing on what his “loyal borderline-obsessive fan base” wants—crazy family anecdotes, heartbreaking road tales and brutally candid personal stories.

Given Maron’s history of exploiting his life in his comedy, the honesty on display in Attempting Normal isn’t surprising, but the frankness is still striking. The essays, which jump around chronologically from childhood to present day, include such details as “My mother always told me that I was a diaphragm baby,” and his happiness at having passed a case of oral herpes along to an ex-wife.

A chapter about his current girlfriend is at times so revealing that it’s hard not to turn away. His willingness to detail his much younger partner’s desire for a baby (and the new house and diamond ring that would accompany it) feels raw, like the fight he’s detailing happened this morning. It’s also these glimpses into his relationship that introduce doubt about his reliability as a narrator. His girlfriend comes across as a harpy with fairytale expectations, which feels unlikely from a woman who famously e-mailed him for casual sex.

The book ends with a transcript of his 2011 Keynote Address at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, as well as an anecdote about losing a cat while filming his new TV show. Both serve as acknowledgments that he has achieved a type of success—not quite superstardom, but a place as a well-respected icon in the comedy industry. He’s still clearly uneasy with this status, as demonstrated by the “You’re going to fuck it up!”/”Let’s fuck it up!” bit that features in both the keynote and the opening moments of his show.

Were Maron’s story made into a film, his present life would probably mark the ending montage—our antihero, laughing with a string of famous guests in his garage, running the set of his own sitcom, making it work with the girlfriend he thanks for “matching [his] crazy,” and detailing the whole ride in his own book. Which is why what happens next may be the most interesting chapter of all. It’s hard to tell how well success will sit on Maron’s shoulders.

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They trickled in to under-attended shows featuring Fortune Feimster and Godfrey next door at the 300-seat Stateside Theatre after Paramount stand-by lines were dispersed or to kill time before leaving early and catching other acts elsewhere from the start. They flocked to smaller venues featuring noteworthy up-and-comers and established workhorses alike, including Dark Lords of Comedy Jared Logan, Mike Lawrence and Dan St. Germain at the Parish Underground (where blaring televisions and sports-centric shouting bled noticeably through the shared walls of Bikini’s Sports Bar), Neal Brennan upstairs at The Parish proper, Pete Holmes at the Scottish Rite Theater, Helen Hong and Moshe Kasher at The Velveeta Room, and Jackie Kashian and Andy Kindler at New York, New York. And then they brandished their Fan badges to flood the InterContinental Hotel’s Esquire Lounge, hobknobbing among performers until 2:30  or 3 a.m.

The festival reduced the number of venues from its first year to its second, but a third go-round might want to consider narrowing its scope even further. Along with Atlanta and Denver, Austin has decidedly established itself as a legit incubator of talent. Multiple local showcases a night is overkill, however, particularly when the quality and attendance end up hi-or-miss and worthy individuals fare far better as openers for high-profile Paramount or Stateside headliners. Elsewhere, the case can be made for greater staggering of theater start times, more aggressive community branding to set itself apart from events like South by Southwest and limiting after-hours Fan badge access when artists want to relax only among members of their industry, as opposed to anyone capable of shelling out for a $129 pass.

To its credit, Moontower is already doing just about everything else right. Programming is varied, imaginative and occasionally, as Wednesday’s Bill Hader success story proved, downright inspired. (Though outside of Texas, all-female lineups like “She-Bang” at St. David’s Bethel Hall have exceeded their expiration date, thanks.) Talent is both compensated and treated well, even if some headlining performances don’t quite draw as hoped. That pressure falls squarely—and happily—upon organizers, who must also be commended for ensuring completely stress-free travel to, from and between venues, fostering a professional yet congenial festival vibe and possessing undeniable passion for the comedic art form. Another two to three years in, and Moontower may be legitimately poised to give Just For Laughs Montreal a run for its loonies in terms of influence, relevance and simply guaranteeing those attending a hell of a good time.

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One hallmarks of a great comedy festival is a wide array of programming. Moontower’s Friday offerings included not only sold-out Bill Burr and Michael Ian Black performances at the Paramount Theatre, but a midnight “This Is Not Happening” storytelling show featuring Ari Shaffir next door at the Stateside Theatre. Local comic-musicians added an Austin-arts flavor with “Comedy Notes,” a low-key, Mario DiGiorgio-hosted gathering at The Hideout highlighting musical comedy, comedy about music, comedy performed while backed by a drum, bass and trumpet trio, and original songs by JR Brow and Billy D. Washington. IFC presented an advance afternoon screening of May 3’s Maron, and like Wednesday’s You Made It Weird and Thursday’s Fitzdog Radio, title star Marc Maron taped a live episode of his podcast, the lively panel of Black, Dom Irrera, Janeane Garofalo, Todd Barry, Maria Bamford and Jim Norton (Burr was slated to join as well, but his own show ran late) cajoling and questioning the motives of each other in front of an engaged crowd of discerning WTF fans who filled the Stateside not quite to capacity despite the fact that no advance lineup was revealed.

Elsewhere Moontower has included live tapings from SiriusXM’s RawDog channel, local sketch and improv (plus a free improv class) and a game show entitled Laugh, Dammit!, in which contestants including Bil Dwyer and Janine Brito are challenged to refrain from laughing. And at each afternoon happy hour (5 to 7 p.m.) and evening’s end (until 2 a.m.), the InterContinental Hotel’s second-floor Steven F’s Bar and Terrace is renamed Esquire Lounge and designated as the de facto meeting, mixing and mingling spot every good festival requires as a social holding tank.

Only in its second year, it’s easy to forgive Moontower’s futile signage for the blithely ignored “VIP only” section of the bar and the fact that the location is wide open to not only the general public, but that special announcements are made before shows extolling anyone with eardrums to attend. Fortunately, this being Austin, the waitstaff is numerous, attentive and nonplussed when Terrace corners start to smell a little…dank. After all, the single most important thing a festival can do for its comedians is provide a fun, comfortable environment in which to be themselves.

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