CD Review: Chance Langton's I'm Better Than Them

Veteran Boston comedian Chance Langton is what I would call an ellipses comedian (that’s right, I just made up a category of comedian). His jokes aren’t technically one-liners, but he has that same quick punch – a line or two of set-up, pause, then punchline.

It’s an act he’s been honing for 30 years, and the stand-up on his album, I’m Better Than Them, newly available on iTunes and Amazon.com, is a lean, efficient set.

It’s all in the timing for Langton, and you can almost count the beats until the punchline:

“I was in Vermont once… that was enough.”

“I drove 100 miles for this show, which is… stupid. Cause I live down the street. There were three accidents on the way… I was in each of them.”

“Remember that song by Gloria Gaynor, ‘I Will Survive?’ … Whatever happened to her?”

It doesn’t quite do justice to Langton’s delivery to print the jokes, but you can get a sense even from just reading them how they land. It’s a classic format, one that you could have heard half a century ago, but Langton sets it off kilter. At his best, Langton’s comedy is inspired silliness. It’s a bit puzzling, but immediately funny.

One of my favorite bits has a longer set-up, but Langton’s standards, but it’s still only a few seconds from start to finish:

“The first time I fell in love, I fell in love with Shirley Temple. I saw her on TV. I was five and she was five. I couldn’t believe. I met her at a mall when I was six… she was 50.”



Langton is also a musician (he was courted by Epic Records in the 70s as a singer/songwriter), and there are four songs on the album in addition to the half-hour stand-up set (“Live at the Capitol Center for the Performing Arts”). The title track, “I’m Better Than Them,” is a list of celebrities that Langton brags about being, well, better than. John Belushi, J.F.K., John Holmes, Jimmy Hendrix. If you’ve spotted ther trend there, you’ve also spotted the joke – they are all dead. Which is how Langton comes off better.

It’s a simple gag, and unlike Langton’s quick-hit jokes, it wears out its welcome after a minute or so. The same is true for “The Laugh Factory,” which seems like a goofy commercial for the Los Angeles comedy club of the same name.

Langton is much better with the loonier “One of the Elves,” a waltzing folk ballad sung by Langton in a helium-tinged voice. There’s an inscrutable kind of melancholy to it, as he sings, “Maybe I’m the monster who’s afraid of himself/Because when the end comes I’m just one of the elves.”

And then there’s the somewhat more straightforward “I Want to Make Money,” a midtempo acoustic rock song about a working stiff daydreaming through the job and hoping for something better. It’s the best song on the album from a musical standpoint, with an assist from “Weird” Al Yankovic’s band (bass player Steve Jay, drummer John Schwartz, and guitarist Jim West).

On a regular folk album, “Elves” and “Money” would be more conspicuous in their oddity. But next to Langton’s stand-up, they seem a bit more subtle.

The best way to hear this stuff is live (Langton is at Nick’s Comedy Stop tonight and tomorrow), but I’m Better Than Them gives you a good idea what you’re in for.

Out Today: Shane Mauss, Jokes to Make My Parents Proud

Shane Mauss often paints himself as “the dumb guy” – someone who doesn’t know a lot about sex and women, someone who likes to drink a bit too much. Someone who, let’s say, might be fooled by the future version of himself coming back after a sex change to fool him into having sex, just to gross his past self out.

You can already see, though, that Mauss’s mind works a little differently. Beneath the sarcasm and the somewhat flattened, Midwestern tone, there’s a nimble imagination, which is all over his first comedy album, Jokes to Make My Parents Proud.

The time-traveling bit is a prime example, based on something Mauss says he had heard about sex changes being more convincing and complete in the future. Mauss could have found an easy target for that premise in some gender-bending celebrity or bashing someone’s sexuality. But he turns the joke on himself, twice, with a time machine thrown in (time machines are a recurring subject on Jokes).

Mauss also has a great bit about wandering into a Best Buy when he was stoned on mushrooms. He thought it was the future. He wound up in the camcorders section. “So for about an hour,” he says, “I watched a movie about me watching a movie about me.”

At times, Mauss brings to mind Louis C.K. for his penchant for telling self-deprecating stories about his sex life (see the last few tracks and his story about trying anal sex with his girlfriend). He’s perfectly willing to show himself being led by his libido and inexperience in a situation where the joke is on him. And he knows how to pepper his stories with one-liners (“I already play with myself so much in the shower that now I get hard when it rains”).

And there’s also a withering wit at work. He talks about being from Wisconsin originally (he’s been honing his craft in Boston for the past six years), and people asking him if there’s a lot of cheese there. “You bet there is!” he says, gleefully. “I can go into a grocery store, get all the cheese I want!”

There’s also his bit about his accidentally leaving an electric blanket on all day, to the frustration of his girlfriend, who says he could have burned the house down. “We’ve been sleeping in a blanket that just randomly bursts into flames?” he says. “Can we go back to the blanket that doesn’t spontaneously combust?”

With the new album up for download on Amazon.com and iTunes (you can only get physical copies at his shows), a Comedy Central Presents coming up on Friday, and a thriving touring career, Mauss is leaving Boston at the end of the month. He’s taking a somewhat non-traditional path, spending some time in Australia before heading to Austin.

It has been fun to watch him develop the material on Jokes for the past few years in Boston, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of him, in Boston, on TV, and on the Web, in the future. Where Mauss will be reunited with his female self. Mauss’s future is a weird, funny place.