Year: 2009

Anna Matsen attended Mary Mack‘s May 18th album-release show at Zanies and sends in this review:

My title isn’t fair. Mary Mack‘s humor isn’t purely absurd, but I’m at a loss how precisely to describe it. The most remarkable description I can give of her performance is that it’s both rambling and compact. Her thoughts flow like a meandering steam — one which, magically, loops back to earlier points with ease — yet the jokes are quick, craftily worded, expertly timed, and (ironically, given my stream analogy) bone dry. To put it another way, many excellent one-liners could be plucked from her material (“I don’t have a wide range of emotion. I get panic attacks, but I’m just not that excited about ’em.”), but strung together these jokes become each other’s seamless context.

Perhaps listing the subjects of her comedy would help. She talks about the eccentricities of her life and family, yet isn’t an “observational” comic (at least, not of the “Say, have you ever noticed …?!” variety). Many of her stories relate to small town northern Wisconsin, yet Nashville laughed as hard at these as it did the rest of her jokes. Once or twice she flirted with political humor, but the affair was fleeting, sweet, and refreshingly undramatic. She opened with a recorder-accordion duet, featured a charming Father’s Day song on mandolin (which will be stuck in your head for a week after hearing it), and finale’d with a special tune on her imaginary musical saw.

The show I saw, her album release show at Zanies (Pinch Finger Girl is well-worth the ten bucks — I’ve already listened to it twice through and will be loaning it out to friends), was my first time experiencing her humor. It took a little time for the crowd to fully warm up, but overall the atmosphere was awe and giggles in honor of the captivatingly eccentric lady with the breathy, pinched voice. Even the waiters seemed more relaxed than usual, reacting to the comic with joyful snickers as they ran between tables. She had one especially clever audience interaction: Miss Mack sang a quick ditty about her hope that the enthusiastically drunk lady near the stage wasn’t a speech therapist. The woman was too busy laughing, along with the rest of the crowd, to speak up for the next ten minutes. (I very much wish I could remember the exact line.)

I do have a conspiracy theory about Mary Mack, and I hope those who’ve seen her act will back me up on this: she’s the long-lost lovechild of Maria Bamford and Steven Wright, secretly raised by down home erratics in the middle of nowhere (i.e. northern Wisconsin) in order to trigger the coping mechanism that generates professional-grade comedic skills.. It’s the only logical explanation.

Mary Mack’s website is MaryMackComedy.com.

Anna Matsen — a word nerd, political junkie, amateur philosopher, sushi-lover, and Nashvillian — attends as many comedy gigs as she can afford. As a grad student of English at Belmont Unversity and an English tutor at The Learning Lab, she works daily to improve her writing skills, hoping to one day write something worth a book jacket. Visit Anna on Facebook.