Baron Vaughn rules as the aristocrat of random comedy

I would say that not a lot of black comedians make jokes like Baron Vaughn, but not a lot of white comedians make his type of jokes, either. Performing at The Laughing Skull from April 19-22, Vaughn crafts jokes around familiar topics like dating, travel and race relations, and adds a conspicuous love of wordplay and antiquated affectations. At the beginning of his album Raised By Cable he explains that he became a comedian because, “I grew up in a neighborhood where people had knives and guns, and I speak like this. I’ll just throw out the word ‘perspicacity’ if I feel it. So my plan was if I’m funny, I won’t be killed.”

Vaughn will work into his set a pun like “spaghetto” or “skycrapists” and clearly enjoys interjecting a phrase like “I say unto you” into an otherwise normal, conversational sentence. On his album he describes being a black actor (or “blacktor”) and describes going to auditions and inevitably being directed to play either a Chris Rock type or a Chris Tucker type. Vaughn’s highest profile acting gig is the role of legal assistant Leonardo Prince on USA’s “Fairly Legal,” but one gets the impression he’d love to play one of “Downton Abbey’s” arch aristocrats. (After all, his name sounds like “Baron von...”) On his most memorable routines, he can launch into mellifluous yet ranting speeches from, say, an enraged homeless guy making incongruous references to 1970s television, or a feline politician with an extravagant Southern accent. My favorite Baron Vaughn bit, both for its humor and its sheer strangeness, is his impression of excitable, lisping character actor Ed Wynn — probably most famous for voicing the Mad Hatter in Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland — as a heart surgeon describing a failed surgery to a grieving family: “Have you ever seen an elephant angrily step on a basketball filled with raspberry jam?”

Here Vaughn, with characteristic unpredictability, performs a medley of David Bowie songs from the movie Labyrinth: