Important Things with Demetri Martin

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—not Demetri Martin, Unperson

This is... the series page for Important Things with Demetri Martin.

OK, so, what shall we do first?

  • Read Important Things with Demetri Martin series summary
  • Read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • Toss computer out window

Read the series summary? OK, we can do that.

Important Things with Demetri Martin is a comedy series airing on Comedy Central, whose host is stand-up comedian, musician and Daily Show alumnus Demetri Martin. It's part stand-up comedy and part Sketch Comedy, and each week, Martin picks one "important thing" such as timing or coolness, then cracks jokes and acts out humorous scenarios (usually with other actors) that all relate to that topic. Occasionally includes mock commercials, animated segments, drawings and music.

...there! Do we check out the tropes?

The Important Things tropes, you say? Sounds great!

Tropes used in Important Things with Demetri Martin include:


  • Acme Products: Important Things things, things coming soon from the Important Things store.
  • And Now for Something Completely Different
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The cards from season two seem to reflect this. For example, the first card on "abilities" had the following three options:
    • Diss Audience Member
    • Dismember Audience
    • Jokes
  • Art Shift: Some of the sketches are animated, most of them drawn frame-by-frame by Martin himself.
  • Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: Done with five stalls.
  • Batman Gambit: Parodied, and lampshaded. King: Did your plan, this dastardly plan, completely rely upon me, as king, for the first time in my entire life, not wanting you to taste this food?
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Several of the cards from Season One.
  • Bungling Inventor: Renaissance Man Da Mici.
  • Butt Monkey: A lot of Demetri's characters.
  • Captain Obvious: As par for the course for Demitri Martin, a great many objects are pointlessly labeled. The opening theme alone has at least twenty-five labels in at most fifteen seconds
  • Dead Baby Comedy: The DADZ sketches.
  • Excellent Adventure: A dude writing a college entry essay on which three historical figures he'd like to have dinner with is magically transported to a local TGI Friday's where he gets the chance to do just that. But he's soon disillusioned when William Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei and Benjamin Franklin turn out to be dirty old men who harass the waitress and eventually get them all kicked out.
    • FUCK YOU CATHY!
  • Fauxlosophic Narration: The Demetrocles sketches.
  • Fractured Fairy Tale: Fairly Important Fairy Tales
  • Incredibly Lame Pun: A lot of the jokes consist of this. Often taking the form of:
  • Just Plane Wrong Surprisingly averted with their very accurate depiction of a Boeing 717 cabin. (It even had basically the same seats as on Airtran Airways, the only airline who flies 717s in the US)
  • Kavorka Man: Jerry Pappas, Time Gigolo.
  • Noodle Incident: One of the options on the Safety episode's opening card is Piñata Knife Surprise.
  • Pluto Is Expendable: Averted. Demetri Martin actually cares about Pluto and feels that it's wrong that it's not considered a planet anymore.
  • Straight Man and Wise Guy: Subverted in the sketch about the all-Straight Man comedy duo.
  • Shout-Out: One sketch is about Demetri pondering who to sit with at a party and concluding that every choice ends with being tortured by having his head placed inside a mesh cage, then having a rat placed in said cage. The smarter viewers recognized this as a shout-out to 1984 by George Orwell, where the protagonist is tortured exactly the same way.
    • This bit is followed by a related sketch, in a commentarial style, in which he explains that they could not get the rat out of the cage right away, as rats cannot walk backwards, so they must let the rat walk all the way around the cage, which results in Demetri having his face filled with rat nards.
  • Teleporter Accident: Parodied. Said parody's deconstruction was Played for Laughs.
  • Time Travel: A common theme from the sketches.
  • Tomato Surprise: A sketch in the "Money" episode features two scientists trying to pretend that one of them is a robot they've built so that their funding doesn't get cut. Then it turns out the other one actually is a robot.
  • Wondrous Ladies' Room: One sketch features a ladies room where the women have a control center set up to do extensive background checks on their dates, complete with calls to the mother and checking what their dates' kinks are.
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