Keith Lowell Jensen, no stranger to TFO audiences, has recently released his new CD entitled “To The Moon – Live At Luna’s.” Get it and find out why he watches pornos backwards.
Elvis Costello once said, “Writing about music is alike dancing about architecture.” You could apply that to stand-up comedy, as well. While both writing and comedy rely on language, the stand-up’s skill set of pacing, improv, delivery, timing, crowd interaction, tailoring material to a crowd, etc., is worlds apart from this writer sitting on his couch.
Or maybe, just maybe, comedy’s more like obscenity. You know, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous “I knows it when I sees it” definition of obscenity, in that humor is a subjective experience that is easy to grasp, but difficult to quantify.
In either case, comedy is somewhat disreputable and confused.
Enter Keith Lowell Jensen, Pied Piper of The Disreputable and Confused. 
Keith is a genuinely funny cat that has been kicking around River City for years and years now and hasn’t done an honest day’s work yet. To keep it that way, I recommend you buy 10 copies of this CD and give them out for birthdays and Xmas.
And LISTEN… to his cutting remarks and storytelling, hell, even a Jenny McCarthy joke!
ENJOY… his observations about… podunk towns with a pizza place and a comedy club, kids at bars, continuation schools – and why they have crappy names. Why the word “Lisp” has an S in it(hint: say it out loud, it’s funnier), that the word for dyslexia should be a palindrome, and why imaginary people are dicks!
There, now I did it. I gave away half his whole flippin’ set, now Keith will have to write and construct a new show, or if I may suggest, simply recycle some old crap from a couple of years ago. Those evening comedy audiences are all nursing a buzz, anyhow. It’s not like anyone will notice.
As usual, Keith’s at ease talking to an audience. Years of defusing hecklers have left him and very fast and funny in his clever comebacks and a master of the tossed-off ad-lib. I’ve seen him do stand-up where he used a few of the jokes on this here CD, but not in the same order. I really like the arrangement and presentation of this set.
This is not Keith as a character, like Francois Fly, the Panhandler or a guy in a banana suit, but a domesticated modern male, whatever that is these days. He goes to the well of personal life – his lovely wife is having a baby and he remarks how great it is that “we’re” pregnant and he still gets to drink coffee. He also mines the fertile ground of pornography, and erupts with growths of infectious comedy!
He acquits himself well at the normal guy humor, occasionally giving us glimpses of Cosby and Newhart-style well-practiced “casual” storytelling (or am I just imagining that?), and flashes of unexpected confusion and profanity in the midst of everyday life, exposing the chaos that we always expected was present in the mundane.
Stand-up is supposed to seem like a guy just talking to you about stuff. Obviously a lot of work has gone into this set to make it seem spontaneous, not just the separate jokes and stories, etc., but work put into assembling a piece with an arc and repeating themes and phrases.
Keith Lowell Jensen is one of the more distinctive local voices, maybe even an annoying voice to some, but certainly one needed to represent Sacramento to the world! Better him than the Maloofs.
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