MITCH HEDBERG/STEPHEN LYNCH: RIVERSIDE THEATER, MILWAUKEE

Staff Member #716: I guess I\'ll start this review with one of the lower points of the night: During Mitch Hedberg\'s set, people in the audience started yelling out joke requests, and Mitch was doing them. Now, like any other Hedberg fan, I\'ve got some favorites that I wanted to hear. But up to that point, he was doing entirely new material (I had never heard it, at least).

Mitch had to have been improvising at least two-thirds of the time he was onstage. He told a few jokes that were only half-finished (in his signature delivery style that\'s hilarious when he does it, but just awkward and confusing when you try to relay the joke to a friend), built a couple off the top of his head, and was just generally having fun playing onstage. He fucked with the guy running the spotlight. He wrapped himself up in the stage curtain (\"This is kinda like when your mom took you to the department store when you were a kid, and you hid in the pants.\") He tripped over the monitors, noting that they wouldn\'t have been there if it wasn\'t for \"...fuckin\' Stephen Lynch!\"

But then people started yelling shit out, and Mitch started doing jokes I\'d already heard on his Comedy Central special or a Letterman appearance. Come on, man. Andy Kaufman made audiences pay for shit like that. Bill Hicks would yell that he\'s \"not a fucking jukebox\". I was enjoying seeing where Mitch was going on his own, and would\'ve liked to have seen it through to the end.

Night Watchman: Following a brief intermission and some more stand up by the night\'s emcee (Last Comic Standing’s Rob Cantrell), it was Stephen Lynch’s time to hit the stage. In great voice and hilarious between-song banter, Lynch barreled through a collection of his funniest songs, including several new tunes yet to be heard on anything other than the new Live at the El Rey DVD. He did the classics, \"Priest\", \"D&D\", and \"Superhero\". After back to back viewings of the DVD and Lynch live in concert, it is amazing the skill and the set that he has built up to showcase his comedy. It is sometimes easy to forget that Lynch is a comedian and not a \'musician\'. His command of the material, his performance, and interaction with the crowd is an amazing juggling act that few could ever pull off once, let alone night after night.