Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
T.J. Miller has introduced himself as “the star of Yogi Bear 3D” since that film debuted in 2010, but seven years later, he’s now much better known as Erlich Bachman, the pompous patriarch hosting the Pied Piper team in his Silicon Valley home.
As we prepare to say goodbye to Erlich this month at the end of Silicon Valley‘s fourth season, HBO is allowing T.J. to shine as his true self, which is, as we’ll quickly learn in his first HBO stand-up special, Meticulously Ridiculous.
Within the first minute, he has splashed himself soaking wet with a water bottle, and by the last minute, he’s smashing pumpkins with a battle axe.
Anyone who has seen Miller perform live in recent years knows his preferred look is a suit with an untucked shirt underneath. For his HBO hour-plus, he’s added a bow tie and red sneakers that pop out from the bottom like clown shoes.
He invites a first impression of him as a modern-day clown, and his history has proven him to be a merry prankster. Miller once managed to make a funny face for his driver’s license, having to go to great lengths to make it seem natural enough to fool the DMV.
If you pay careful attention, you’ll find extra layers of jokes in this HBO hour, too.
Captions may pop up onscreen ever so briefly, explaining and enhancing what seemed like off-handed or ad-libbed remarks onstage. A couple of moments get punctuated and repeated as if you’re already watching a video remix. And because he’s in Denver to record the special before a hometown audience, of course, he’ll have something to say about marijuana, but so, too, will his audience.
Miller’s a highly skilled improviser, which he uses to great effect not only playing off of the randomness of audience members, but also in his joke-writing, following premises to absurd heights and tangents.
Take his take on “bitches be crazy,” for example; or on “only time will tell.” Miller will force you to ponder who’s the better inventor: Eli Whitney or George Washington Carver? And he’ll stick up for you if you laugh so loudly or oddly that your other friends mock you for it. Why should you feel self-conscious about being happy?
Miller will shoulder the embarrassment for you. Indeed, he has put meticulous effort into his onstage foolishness.
And even if some of his antics are truly ridiculous, such as wielding a battle axe, he’ll also fool you at times by making a hard turn into real talk about death, or about how relative our morality is.
As he acknowledges during his HBO hour: “I’m a handful. I’m a bit of a handful.”
But unlike the characters he plays on TV, he’s no Gorburger and he’s no mere Erlich. T.J. Miller is much more than that.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
