Live at the Purple Onion

Long before his mainstream breakout, there was just a bearded man sitting at a piano in San Francisco, sipping beer and occasionally letting the silence stretch out until it felt actively hostile. The act relies on patience and quiet absurdity. He delivers deliberate, isolated jokes over soft background music, noting the Scrabble point value of the word “diarrhea” and confessing an ongoing addiction to cold turkey.

Taped in 2005 at the Purple Onion and released the following year, the hour functions as a core document of 2000s alternative comedy. It captures him at a transition point: a respected touring comic who hadn’t yet been absorbed by big-budget studio films.

The stage performance is interspersed with offstage sketches. The most memorable involves an ongoing interview with his fictional twin brother, Seth. Sporting a tracksuit and a standalone mustache, Seth offers strange, defensive commentary on his sibling’s life.

The show concludes without a spoken punchline. Instead, as a local boychoir sings in the background, he stands mutely on stage, tearing pages from an oversized notepad to reveal a sequence of self-deprecating written jokes.