Pitchfork 2010: Organizers sweeten the lineup with the first-ever comedy stage while Modest Mouse brings the sour notes to close out the night

Day 1 Part 2, July 16, in Chicago

By Selena Fragassi & Sarah Collins
Published: July 17th, 2010 | 11:30am

Pitchfork is not exactly known for its sense of humor, so adding a comedy stage to the 2010 lineup caught us by surprise. With four of today's best alt-comics, the laughs helped ease the crowd into a blistering Friday night and also helped shake the fest's sometimes dour image.

Hannibal Buress, aka Time Out's-crowned “funniest man in Chicago,” lived up to his reputation and showed that his recent move to New York to write for Saturday Night Live has only sharpened his nerdy wit. His jokes focused on the best and worst of his new professional lifestyle, such as making interns feel important by giving them a consolation fax after jockeying his paperwork and lunch breaks where he seasons his sandwich with a few flicks of pickle juice. Buress has been credited with redefining what it means to be a black comedian with jokes about things like the onomatopoetic nature of guns in rap music (he suggests kablooey instead of chk chk chk). When Buress does formatively tackle race, it's to discuss how his love of apple juice allows him to forget racism. But that doesn't matter when it's 90 degrees on a Friday afternoon. What matters is that he's funny enough to make people forget about the sweat.

Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington treated the front three rows like a splash zone during his host sketch. He came out as John the magician in a full cape and top hat, and, with the help of a progressively less willing assistant, covered a pure white rag with his own feces (or a Babe Ruth bar) and threw it into the audience. The whole bit was an extended joke about religion being equivalent to magic. In a crowd of believers, he said his prayers were answered, and Jesus works magic through him. But the sinless Pitchfork audience sapped his powers. At least that's what I was able to gather. He was too awkward in his public speaking role to pull the joke off with ease.

The comedy stage was under the biggest patch of shade in the park, so it had a pretty constant rotation of people looking to cool off and sit down for a few minutes. But Wyatt Cenac and his Daily Show cachet drew enough people to crowd the field. Cenac drills the same comedic vein as Buress, just more lackadaisically. His longest bit discussed the finer points of a kitten YouTube video, and how it was able to beat out Obama's plea for help with the Gulf oil spill by 999,000 views. He noted that he tried to analyze the comments for insight, but after one viewer called the orange tabby the n-word, it prompted him to wonder if the cat jumping in and out of a box wasn't a metaphor for the double consciousness of shifting between a dominant white society and a black culture that's been marginalized. Mixing kitten videos with W.E.B. Dubois discussions? Yeah, that's comedy blurring race lines. After Cenac, Harrington threw ant traps into the crowd. So, not shit, but still splash zone. He also performed an equally awkward number as Pump the Rapper, where he tried to count 100 things Pump could do in bed before being pulled offstage.

Michael Showalter made Harrington look suave with his disastrous performance. Competing with a set by Broken Social Scene across the park isn’t easy, but Showalter let his bit go off the rails. He tried to start the set off by playing his own songs to compete, but spent most of his time complaining about the noise. BSS was audible, but not so loud to drown him out, just enough to distract him and leave him stumbling through the set. It turned into a pretty fun audience discussion about which Michael Showalter bit he should perform, but I don’t think he managed to get a fully-formed joke out the whole set. The audience would have been better served on the other side of the concession stands, where at least BSS was putting on a performance.

Eugene Mirman, however, dealt with the noise admirably, by turning BSS’s songs into an alien attack. But Mirman owed the audience a good show after Harrington poured a water-filled Drano container on the audience (yep, splash zone). And Mirman delivered ... with props. He brought with him a stack of advice napkins he sneaks into bars (“This napkin entitles you to talk about politics even though you’re drunk and uninformed”). He also brought icons from the Tea Party message board he had infiltrated, as well as the slogans he invented for them (one started with “Don’t Pee in my Tea” and ended with “Crocodile Dundee”). He even handed out a stack of assorted business cards (“Eugene. Google Me” and “Fuck You”). And, he did an impersonation of a child with Asperger's Syndrome that both respected the child and attacked religion. An alum of Patton Oswalt’s famed Comedians of Comedy tour (which launched Zack Galifianakis and Maria Bamford’s careers), he was a great pick to close out a set of low-key comedy. [Sarah Collins]

Broken Social Scene had an unfortunate scheduling conflict with their 7:20 slot as they competed with the first-ever Pitchfork Comedy Stage that had been a work in progress all day until its primetime debut. While funnymen like Eugene Mirmen and Michael Showalter brought out the laughs at the Balance Stage across the park, BSS made up for it with a breezy set of chamber indie pop and no less than nine members to add a chorus line to the daunting and dedicated collective.

Although fame and fortune has become of many of the former BSS clan, such as Emily Haines (Metric), Feist, Jason Collett, Amy Millan, and Elizabeth Powell (Land of Talk), this latest lineup shows time and change can only lead to growth and prosperity. Founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning were in top form and quite chipper as they led the ensemble in classic numbers and new favorites from 2010’s tongue-in-cheeker Forgiveness Rock Record (Arts & Crafts), which brought the Canadians to Chicago’s turf to record with the famed John McEntire. American recording or not, the performance of “Texaco Bitches” brought the band back to familiar anti-national statements in light of the Gulf spill and offered ironic hiccups before bringing newish member Lisa Lobsinger to the microphone for more light-hearted melodies. Broken Social Scene may not have changed much in opinion, but they have come a long way from their performance at Chicago’s Intonation fest years ago. [Selena Fragassi]

Modest Mouse was a great pick to close out a lazy Friday. Unfortunately sound problems made the band sound patchy and distant toward the back half of the crowd. And since the festival was sold out (and is for the whole weekend), people were packed to the fences. The audio issues and small screens caused a good chunk of the crowd to lose interest, but tracks off of Good News for People Who Love Bad News, like “Satin in a Coffin,” “Black Cadillacs” and “The View,” pulled the audience in all the way to the back of the park. The hour and a half felt stretched, but transcendent songs like “Satellite Skins,” peppered the set with enough to make sticking around worthwhile. Modest Mouse can’t take all the credit for sending the crowd into the streets buzzed, but encoring with “Gravity Rides Everything” turned it into a pleasant high. [Sarah Collins]

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Read up on Pitchfork Day 1: Part 1 and Part 2

Read up on Pitchfork Day 2: Part 1 and Part 2

Read up on Pitchfork Day 3: Part 1 and Part 2