It’s happy hour at the Permanent Records Roadhouse, a dive bar and record store in a potholed stretch of east Los Angeles, and Fred Armisen is advising the audience to talk through his set. “Feel free to text, interrupt, go, and come back,” he says. “Whatever you want to do.”
Armisen is a substantial name in comedy from his time on Saturday Night Live, but he’s never been known to hog the spotlight—so it’s not exactly a surprise to find that he’s indifferent to the way people treat him onstage. (Or, in this case, not even a stage, but rather just a checkerboard floor area at the far end of the bar.) He’s less a brand than a comedic support beam—someone prone to appearing in scenes where other people, usually more famous than him, perform parts that bounce off of or lean on him from the place in the back where he’s been shoved, waiting patiently to deliver a deadpan joke or two. Sometimes he doesn’t deliver a joke at all; sometimes the joke is that he’s just … standing there.
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