What constitutes a well-crafted dumb joke? To Casey Crawford, it’s absurd, short in the style of Steven Wright or Emo Phillips and often draws on his youth in South Dakota. However he defines it, he does it well, and you won’t want to miss him record it. After years of telling such jokes – including selection as one of Montreal’s Just For Laughs New Faces and on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” – the New England favorite and co-champion of this year’s Boston Comedy Festival is committing an hour of his work to tape in an hour called “Joke Teller.” Rounding out the lineup on this locally grown show are Rob Crean (Anderson Comedy, Tea Party Tonight) and Davis Square favorite Janet McNamara (The Burren Comedy, “American Idol” … she’ll tell you more about that). The type of short writing Casey does is challenging and intricate. The jokes (“People come up to me in the woods all the time and ask me if I work there”) may be characterized as dumb, but it takes a smart and dedicated comic to pull it off like he does.
“Joke Teller” at 7 p.m. Sept. 20 (no late seating permitted) at The Rockwell, 255 Elm St., Davis Square, Somerville. $20 to $25.
The feature image on this column has parts that were created in a digital retouching process: The far sides of the feature image’s background and left shoulder were created by computer after being cropped out by the photographer. The image above is unretouched and as photographed.
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