"Did you know that in your lifetime, you are more likely to get attacked by a domesticated pig than by a shark?" Doug Benson inquires. "That is a true statistic, especially if you have a tendency to swim in pig-infested waters."
Silly? Yes. Funny? Also yes. San Diegan Doug Benson has been performing standup comedy since 1986, when his buddies dared him to hop on the stage and do three minutes. He's released seven comedy albums, starred in the movie Super High Me, and costarred on everything from Friends to Mr. Show with Bob and David. If Wikipedia is to be believed, he appeared as a visible extra in Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and backup dancer (!) in Captain EO. In 2009, thanks to a jokey appearance on Fox News's Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, Benson scored something of a coup by pissing off the entire government of Canada. He appears frequently on Jimmy Kimmel Live and @midnight, and hosts not one but three wildly popular podcasts. If you're curious and have three free hours a week to kill, they're called The Benson Interruption, Doug Loves Movies and Getting Doug With High. The latter is about how much fun it is to smoke weed. It's amazing how little trouble Benson has getting guests. "Marijuana pleases us," he explains in his self-produced show, The Marijuana-Logues. "The last time I was (at Disneyland), I got more stoned than the Ten Commandments."
He's also a huge fan of the Pacific Northwest, by which I mean he detests it. "In Seattle," he says, "they have a saying: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and then shoot yourself in the face." It's to our collective credit that he overcame this aversion to play the Tacoma Comedy Club April first. This isn't an elaborate April Fool's Day prank, by the way. He really will be there. I checked.
Much of Benson's act consists of advice you can use in your very own life - such as it is, given that you have time to listen to three different podcasts by the same guy each week. "It's deadly to dogs to eat grapes," he says, "so I think all chocolate from now on should be surrounded in grape. ... Why would any woman agree to be on a show called Bridezillas? It's not like men would agree to be on Douchegroom. ... I actually got pulled over once for driving in the diamond lane. Cop said to me, ‘You know you have to have more than one person in the car to drive in the carpool lane.' I said, ‘Check the trunk.'" See? Now you can eat chocolate around your dog, make wise TV booking choices and get tased and arrested like a pro.
DOUG BENSON, 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 1, Tacoma Comedy Club, 933 Market St., Tacoma, $20, 253.282.7203