Important Things with Demetri Martin

Think the deadpan Steven Wright, only cheerier and more versatile. A stand-up comic and sometime cartoonist, Martin seems cursed with endless postgraduate cleverness.

You'll find an important (and rare) thing: an off-kilter show that's at once smart, outlandish and very funny.

The surreal comedy of Steven Wright is clearly an influence on Martin (one of Martin’s jokes: “I wonder if there were any Goths in Gothic times”), but Important Things also has a boldly silly streak.

Some of the humor works less well--Martin playing five instruments while flipping through a sketch pad is more strange than funny--but Martin is clearly a smart guy and his intellectual humor succeeds more often than it fails.

Important Things is inconsistent--the sketches are on the whole less funny than the stand-up, but they have their moments, and the show is on the whole worthwhile.

Like "Saturday Night Live," "Important Things" is often hit and miss, but the simplest way for Martin to smooth over the bumps would be to become more comfortable in the stand-up segment.

As is the case with nearly all sketch-comedy series, this one from "The Daily Show" alum Demetri Martin--and produced by Jon Stewart's Busboy Prods.--is very much hit-and-miss, with the misses outnumbering the hits in the first installment and the hits predominating in the second.