Ten Fun Facts about Demetri Martin

It's March, so that means it's Demetri Martin Month on SUCH!

To kick the month off right, here are some fascinating facts about one of my favorite stand-up comedians whom I have seen perform three times in person (2004 for Spiral Bound, 2020 for the ill-fated Wandering Mind tour, and most recently in Glenside at the Keswick Theater in June 2025 for the Quick Draw tour). He is somehow 52 years old but, like Paul Rudd, never seems to age haha.

Enjoy!

1. Demetri taught himself how to be ambidextrous, and he can now write with both hands legibly.

2. He graduated with a degree in History from Yale University. He then attended New York University School of Law on a scholarship but dropped out after his second year to pursue comedy as a career (a point he mentions in his CC Presents episode and his one-man show If I).

After Yale, he went to law school for a while but dropped out to do standup. He started out doing long-winded absurdist narratives, but his style has evolved, and now he favors the stringently economical joke.

3. Demetri has an extensive list of entertainment credits, including being a writer for Late Night with Conan O’Brien. He was also a correspondent on The Daily Show in a segment called Trendspotting. Each segment had him dressed like a Wes Anderson character dispensing wisdom.

4. He created and starred in the cult favorite Important Things with Demetri Martin that aired on Comedy Central for 2 seasons. I still have my DVD for Season 1!

   

   
   

   The show had lots of connections to modern comedy, such as John Mulaney, Nathan Fielder, and H. Jon Benjamin to name a few. Plus, it’s how Demetri met his wife, Rachael Beame!

H. Jon Benjamin on the show

Nathan Fielder in season 2

Rachael Beame on the show and the happy couple

The Passive Aggressive race sketch features a lot of familiar faces as well, including a very young Mulaney who was a credited writer on the show!

5. Demetri is known in the comedy world for his eclectic sets, which typically incorporate music and drawings on a sketchboard labeled “COMEDY.” In terms of musical instruments, Demetri plays a variety of them during his shows, including the guitar, harmonica, keyboard, and the tambourine.

   According to his You Made It Weird podcast episode with Pete Holmes from 2011, Demetri said that he chose to add music so that his comedy act on TV couldn't be out of order. The editors couldn’t move bits around like they typically do because the jokes wouldn't make sense for continuity purposes. Pretty clever!

There were some unmistakably soprano cheers and one tu-whit, tu-whoo whistle as he began to assemble his props: a Casio keyboard playing a shimmering three-note song reminiscent of Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther” theme, and a child-size acoustic guitar, plugged into a pair of small speakers.

Classic Demetri prop—a giant notepad with COMEDY written on it (2020 and 2025)

6. Demetri is also an author and has published 3 books (This Is a Book, Point Your Face at This, and If It's Not Funny It's Art). All of them are fantastic reads, but I also highly recommend his audiobook This Is an Audiobook. Absolutely brilliant, and he adds so much to the characters in the book.

7. In addition to his comedy, writing, and music, Demetri has also acted! His most well-known roles are in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and his own film Dean that he wrote and directed. The latter is a fun watch and somewhat similar to Garden State in its plot with some delightful Demetri twists.

8. One of his most famous works is his Palindrome Poem: https://www.nku.edu/~longa/classes/mat385_resources/docs/Palindromic-Poem.pdf

The poem originated in a fractals class. It was a hundred and fifty words long, and the professor was so excited by it that he sent it to Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish-born fractician. Since then, the poem has grown to two hundred and twenty-three words; it has multiple internal palindromes, on the level of the line, the sentence, and the individual word.

As a lover of all kinds of wordplay, this appealed to me immediately!

9. Speaking of things I adore, Demetri also has constructed puzzles for fun. He explains this interest in If I, but his 3D crossword puzzles from Yale are certainly creative. I doubt I would have been able to solve them!

   

   
   

10. And finally, Demetri was the first comic who introduced sadness as a powerful element in a comedy show to me as a young fan. Prior to seeing him in 2004, I had assumed that a comedy show had to have nonstop jokes and laughing to qualify as that genre. What Spellbound taught me was that a comedian can discuss a sad topic like their divorce and it actually heightens the entire show. I have him to thank for changing my view of what the medium could be, and I celebrate all forms of comedy today!

I hope you enjoyed these fun facts, and stay tuned for more Demetri posts in the days to come.