Place the Face with the Voice and Watch Eugene Mirman's Netflix Special "Vegan on His Way to the Complain Store"
/
With so many good things on, it is time to grab the extra tvs
Yesterday I finally got to watch Eugene Mirman's stand up special on Netflix entitled, "Vegan on His Way to the Complain Store".
Now for those of you out there that don't know who Eugene Mirman is, maybe you're familiar with his voice acting on the fantastic TV show, "Bob's Burgers". He plays the voice of the male child, Gene. He's my personal favorite on that show. Mirman's voice acting is absolutely hilarious. To give you a taste of the dialogue, Gene says to Bob, "that's channel five news, they'll finger anything with a pulse. Bob replies, "I think their slogan is, our finger is on the pulse", then Gene replies, "I'm pretty sure it's, we'll finger anything with a pulse, look they're fingering us right now!". That's hilarious.
The first place I saw Eugene Mirman was on the great, underrated TV show, "Flight of the Conchords". He played Bret and Jermaine's landlord named Eugene. He was used sparingly on the show, but when he was on, it was always funny. There's one scene in particular where he's stuck in an elevator with Jermaine and he's showing him the new faucets for the apartment building. Jermaine tries to use the faucet, complaining to Eugene that it doesn't even work. We all know it doesn't work because it's not hooked up to anything, but these two play this scene to big, big laughs. It's small in stature, but huge in hilarity.
I started to get into Eugene Mirman more after "Flight of the Conchords" went off the air. Mirman and Kristin Schaal were the two people outside of the main characters that I needed to know more about. So, I bought Mirman's two comedy albums and they are comedic gold. He's an excellent stand up. He's was on the cusp of the alternative comedy scene. Hell, he might have been one of the first. He has a great bit on one of his albums about whale watching in Maine, I believe, and he talks about how beautiful it is, but all he could think of doing was going from person to person to ask them, in a whisper, if they had any condoms. His first four albums are all great, especially, "God is a 12 Year Old Boy with Aspergers" and he has his own sense of humor and how he performs it to an audience is, uniquely, Eugene Mirman. He does bits where he reads open letters that he's written to town magazines or papers. He does stuff about art, and then he'll present his crude drawings with funny stories behind them. He loves to take pictures and then explain a weird occurrence involving himself or a group of friends that said occurrence happened to, holding the picture up the whole time. He creates new slogans for companies. My favorite thing he does in his act, he signs up on dating websites, or websites like LinkedIn and writes crazy stuff in his bio.
All of these bits are in "Vegan on His Way to the Complain Store", and it's all very funny. For instance, he has a LinkedIn bio bit, where he says he's the VP of Pee Pee at Verizon. He explains that it's still on his personal bio page because, "no one fact checks anything on LinkedIn". He also said that, to further hammer home his point about no one fact checking anything on LinkedIn, he gets a lot of calls about open VP positions at different companies due to what they saw on LinkedIn. It's really funny. He does an audience Q and A during his set, and it's found out during this, that he will answer questions from his fans on Facebook, as long as it's not something weird like, "I'll wash your shoes". We also learn that he likes to ask celebrities very absurd questions on Facebook, hoping that one day they'll respond. Listening to him talk about the ridiculously hilarious things he asks politician John Boehner is wonderfully absurd. It's great. He does the art thing during this special, explaining that he contacted Whole Foods, asked if he could put art in their store, and they begrudgingly said yes. His artwork is hilariously childish, on purpose of course, and his titles for his pieces are really funny. My favorite thing he did in this new special was, he explained how he got a parking ticket while he and his girlfriend were sight seeing in New Hampshire. I won't go into the whole bit, but he got a ticket for "parking the wrong way". He backed into a spot, apparently that's illegal in New Hampshire, and he goes into a whole story about a letter he wrote that will be published in the New Hampshire Summer Guide. He's obviously very angry about the ticket and he felt the best way to get back at them was, to write an angry, yet very funny letter about it. Watch the special for this bit alone, it's fantastic.
"Vegan on His Way to the Complain Store" is another excellent addition to Eugene Mirman's already large body of stand up specials. He's an awesome comedian and people need to know about him, if they don't already. Fans of his will love this special, and this special should also bring him some new fans. Yes, "Bob's Burgers" and, to a lesser extent, "Flight of the Conchords" made him better known, but stand up is where he's gained his notoriety.
So, watch "Vegan on His Way to the Complain Store", it's really, really great and comes highly recommended from yours truly.
Ty
Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the co-host of the X Millennial Man podcast.