You know the 5 stages of accepting death right? Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance… in the case of accepting your nerd-dom, you go through the same steps, but the best nerds go all the way back around to anger again, and there they will stay. Brian Posehn is an angry nerd, and fortunately a funny one, so he won’t completely alienate himself from his loving fans such as myself. His most recent comedy album, Fart & Wiener Jokes, has a little bit of old and a little bit of new, but enough raunchy material to keep the kiddies in the other room.
For those of you who know Brian’s work including the “Slayer man-rape double negative,” you know he is a self-proclaimed metal head. I give Brian major props for singing his own metal rendition of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” to close the album. Brian’s original metal ballad “More Metal Than You” was also worth skipping to the end.
I recently saw Brian at Cobb’s Comedy Club, so I knew a lot of the material that was covered on the album. You know you’ve hit gold at one of these shows when you find yourself injecting these jokes in conversations with whatever friend or significant other you dragged to the festivities. My golden moment happened when he talked about his tiny cute wife farting in the car before they pulled up to the valet one evening and about how no one could suspect her because he looks like he is “made of farts.” I literally laughed until I cried because he does indeed look like some weird fart monster.
It pays in comedy to turn yourself into the butt of any joke. Brian made light of his physical shortcomings by listing the things this scary 6 foot 6 ‘sasquatch’ cannot do:
- No Night Digging
- No complimenting parents on their children at the mall
- No combinations of attire that include a Halloween mask with denim overalls
But not all of his anecdotes are full of resentment… he makes sure to thanks Jesus for giving him a “rapie-baby-face” before moving on.
Through some of his late night adventures, he elaborates on the prospect of getting sodomized by Dennis Rodman and encountering generic LA plastic jobs that have lead to an epidemic of Hot Girl Down Syndrome across Hollywood. Brian also discussed getting turned off by Bay Area strippers… if this was after the show we attended, I have to apologize for that one Brian.
My biggest and only complaint is not the repeat material, it’s the fact that the album was a bit too short for my taste. I prefer comedy albums to be over an hour which gives me just enough time to escape reality. Yeah, I know material comes in short supply for CD translations, but I just need a little more to take the edge off.
There’s nothing else I can say about this album without butchering the had-to-be-there nature of the humor. In other words, buy this album, you won’t be disappointed, and eat it with a side of Slayer.
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Fart & Wiener Jokes will be released April 27 on Relapse Records.
