John Hodgman Steps Out of "The Daily Show" John Hodgman in "I Stole Your Dad." The actor and comic John Hodgman removes the mask he regularly wears - of the complacently geeky, avuncular expert on everything who's really an expert on nothing - to reveal some of his personal anxieties in "I Stole Your Dad," his new solo show at the Public Theater. In this agreeable if not particularly substantial monologue, the Under the Radar festival edges toward more populist terrain than it usually occupies. The show is essentially standard stand-up comedy featuring a familiar performer. Mr. Hodgman, best known for his appearances on "The Daily Show," (he's also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine), relates funny tales of his life as son and dad, and of his career as a professional wiseacre offering lunatic commentary with a smiling, babyish straight face. He enters dressed in layers of hoodies and parkas, with sunglasses, looking like a criminal captured in a surveillance photo. After corralling an audience member into making an introduction, Mr. Hodgman soon strips off the layers, revealing each to be a bit of swag he collected during his career: a sweatshirt from "The Daily Show," where he has been a contributor for many years, a hoodie from the HBO series "Bored to Death." "I Stole Your Dad" - the meaning of that rather odd title takes a while to emerge - is vaguely styled as Mr. Hodgman's attempt to muddle through a middle-years crisis. His anxieties on this score emerged, he tells us, when his loudly advertised expectation that the apocalypse would arrive in 2012, as the Maya supposedly foretold, failed to come to pass. Mr. Hodgman found the prospect oddly comforting, since the knowledge that he had to die was softened by schadenfreude: Everybody else would, too. Didn't work out that way. So, like the rest of us, Mr. Hodgman, must soldier on, in his case by moving into new territory: telling funny stories about his kids. By way of maintaining his credentials as the kind of off-kilter comic who appears on the primordially hip "Daily Show," he substitutes the word "cat" for "kid" when he relates cute stories about the squabble between his 8-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter as the family sits down to watch "Downton Abbey" together. Still, shtick about "Downton Abbey" is still shtick about "Downton Abbey," and Mr. Hodgman's isn't particularly incisive. But then he finds considerable comic fodder in the anxiety of schlumping along at the back of a pack in a culture ever spinning out new of-the-moment trends. Feeling the pressure that the middle-aged often do to roll back the years, Mr. Hodgman says he's decided to take the psychotropic route: He's going to start in on the 420. That's marijuana to you. The centerpiece of the monologue is Mr. Hodgman's description of a visit to a Southern university where he was invited to give the Mark Twain lecture - despite his never having read any Twain. His adventures among faculty and students eventually lead us to the tale of the title. Mr. Hodgman scores a victory for the crankily middle-aged by separating a father and son who act the same age. Dad gives a thumb up when son says he's got some pot. In a stealth move, Mr. Hodgman slyly puts some Elvis Costello into the music mix, and hip-daddy starts singing along, revealing his true cultural age. Score one for the 40-somethings. Mr. Hodgman's neo-nerd style is appealing, and even when the material isn't particularly novel, he soft-pedals it in a way that contrasts nicely with the more aggressive approach of many solo comics. But the show's most potently funny segment arrives when he strikes out for loopier territory, in an impersonation of Ayn Rand, whom he recalls watching with fascination on the "Phil Donahue Show" (of all things) in the late 1970s. Stripping down to his underwear (thanks!) to don a hilariously fusty frock, Mr. Hodgman employs a thick pseudo-Russian accent to impersonate Rand in a role she never played, as advice columnist for Parade magazine, the middlebrow Sunday newspaper supplement. In between urging readers to live up to their birthright, the right to be utterly selfish, she makes cranky comments about the difficulty of opening soda cans and the cultural scourge that is Alan Alda. Even Mr. Donahue's wife, Marlo Thomas, must be upbraided for spreading an evil philosophy: that popular self-esteem-boosting children's album she produced would not be so bad, Rand insists, if only she'd called it "Free to Be ... Only Me.