Kate Berlant's Experimental Comedy - NYTimes.com Kate Berlant, outside the Lower East Side club Cake Shop, has a disconcerting take on comedy. It was a typical stand-up show, with embarrassing personal stories and observational gripes, until Kate Berlant strutted onstage in the East Village bar Niagara. She was wearing a backpack and an expression out of a TED talk. "Isn't it amazing," she said, walking up to a dirty air-conditioner, "how you can be so close to technology and so alienated by it?" The response was a wall of silence interrupted by a few knowing laughs. Ms. Berlant's eyes widened, her head nodding as if the quiet was due to awe. When she pivoted on the tiny stage, her avalanche of dark curls swung to one side and she pointed at a shard of glass on the floor. "See," Ms. Berlant, said as if she had just discovered the smoking gun. Being onstage is a risk. Ms. Berlant, a magnetic improvisational comic who is to perform on Friday at the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, the annual Brooklyn showcase that draws a comedy-savvy crowd, has been described as a surrealist and an absurdist, but neither is exactly right. Delivering charismatic theory-driven speeches in lineups of joke-tellers, Ms. Berlant, who is 26, resists - and even questions - easy categorization. She may be best understood as an avant-garde theater artist whose aggressive artifice makes the irreverent argument that comedy needn't be rooted in truth. In 2005 I wrote an essay arguing that the theatrical avant-garde was shrugging off its black turtleneck reputation and embracing broad, silly comedy. In a complementary trend, comedy has expanded its tent to include formally daring artists like Tig Notaro, Reggie Watts and Ms. Berlant. You might call this growing genre experimental comedy. The lines, of course, were always blurred. Andy Kaufman played comedy clubs; Whoopi Goldberg did theaters. But now Mr. Watts, whose delirious brand of nonsense makes him the closest stylistic cousin to Ms. Berlant, seamlessly moves from the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater to the IFC television series "Comedy Bang Bang," although the context matters. On a theater stage Ms. Berlant would be an amusing eccentric, but booked alongside young comedians, her willfully elusive monologues seem not just odd, but disruptive, even subversive. Ms. Berlant will not be to everyone's taste. Her comedy is rarefied on one level, but broadly silly on another. She doesn't really tell jokes. She holds forth in the digressive voice of a seductive, larger-than-life guru, evoking a New Age businesswoman or a trendy academic. Her outsized personas shift slightly, enough to indicate they're contrived, but her language and style remain remarkably consistent wherever she performs. A skilled physical comedian, Ms. Berlant has a flexible face that doesn't contort into a multitude of rubbery looks so much as a few deliriously weird ones. There's the cross-eyed mask of tragedy; the sage face of wonder; and a weirdly clownish mug with her mouth and eyebrows going crooked in diagonal tandem, which looks like a portrait done by a child who would grow up to be a serial killer. Part of her humor comes from the way she captures a certain kind of dense, portentous rhetoric as if it's a second language, which in a way it is. Ms. Berlant earned degrees in the cultural anthropology of comedy and performance studies from New York University. Hearing her spout seminar jargon ("I'm very interested in the social topography of space") in comedy rooms is jarring and she unpacks phrases and words with an eerie precision. "What is a "ticket"?" she asked at the Pit, pausing before deconstructing the word senselessly. Tick. Et. Tick tock? It's a great comic flourish that spins self-serious rhetoric with a familiar structure into goofy, giddy gibberish. "I was forced into comedy early because of my bone structure," she says in a throwaway line. Ms. Berlant's speeches can resemble the sculptured nonsense of "The Bald Soprano," but whereas that classic Ionesco play has hardened into a theatrical style taught in colleges, her comedy is more unpredictable. Her almost stream-of-consciousness monologues can devolve into wandering indulgence. Her sets lack shape and direction. At 10 minutes, she's a rush of weird energy, but when she did 30 minutes recently at the Pit, she seemed at times to be going in circles. Traditional long-form improv is much more structured, with narrative, jokes and an intact fourth wall. Upright Citizens Brigade is comedy's well-made play next to Ms. Berlant's quick-hit performance art. If her show has a story, it's about the relationship between her and the audience. Ms. Berlant frequently talks about wearing a mask onstage, and one of her favorite lines is, "The moment you hide is the moment you most reveal yourself." It has the Jedi master ring of hollow wisdom but also gets at the core of what she appears to be reacting against. Ms. Berlant takes aim at nothing less than what has become the most sacred orthodoxy of comedy today: The notion that the best comedy is derived from authentic experience. This veneration of comedic truth, often at the expense of less-cited virtues like imagination, has become so widespread and unquestioned that comics sound like rappers boasting about being "real." Ms. Berlant's comedy makes a mockery of realness. She keeps it fake. She spills paragraphs of verbiage about herself without revealing anything. And she says nothing with the profundity of a thousand tenured professors. The few details of her life she shares are obvious lies. She said she was once in vaudeville, for instance. At the same time, there is integrity to her artifice, a conviction behind her aesthetic that isn't merely satirical. While she's parodying a type of intellectual bravado, the main thing her monologues attack is the idea that there is a strict divide between our real self and the one we put onstage. Onstage, she is all mask; that's her truth. At the Pit, she paused to address the sparse crowd. "I want to open it up for questions," she said, walking toward the front row. I want to, but I won't. In a way, I just did. She flashes a smug expression that seems to say: Did I just blow your mind? Considering that her marvelously mystifying act invites questions about whether she's joking and whether this is even comedy, maybe she did.