Grade A

Reviewing stand-up comedy isn't normally part of The Spin's job description, but given the slew of shows canceled by last weekend's whiteout, we were forced to improvise. So we headed over to The End Monday night to catch Neil Hamburger. Anyone who writes a joke like "Why did the Red Hot Chili Peppers go under the bridge? Because there was a plate of shit there they wanted to jack off into" is easily worth our time and attention.

Fans lovingly refer to him as the world's worst comedian. Of course, Neil Hamburger is merely a persona, and his act a put-on — a hard truth made all the more evident when we saw him entering the club out of character, shattering the illusion of the bespectacled curmudgeon. Even more surprisingly, he was accompanied by Canadian comedy ambassador Tom Green, who had just appeared throughout the weekend at Zanies. More on him later.

We made our way inside the reasonably crowded club just as our favorite local funny man Chris Crofton began a streamlined version of an act we've come to know and love. He dove headfirst into gag-inducing sexual descriptions of fecalphiliacs, jokes about rockabilly douches, diatribes against new media, tales of desecrating slave burial grounds while on LSD and even a joke making light of the tragedy in Haiti. Too soon?

While we knew what to expect with Crofton, who killed, we were completely unprepared for the night's second act, Daiquiri — a one-man performance artist, musician, comedian and master of awkward silences. Using myriad effects processors, an overhead projector and some samples, this excitable artiste spent the first portion of his set singing and spastically dancing about the stage to minute-long compositions that we can best describe as sounding like a cross between Dan Deacon and Limp Bizkit.

Daiquiri's self-reflexive masterpiece of a monster ballad "Opening Act" — which, blow by blow, laid out the plight of a performer in his very position — could've had us right there, but he proceeded with a routine of purposely awful jokes and an inharmonious cover of Def Leppard's "Love Bites" that sent us running for the frigid comfort of the smoking section. Daiquiri's set was easily more performance than art, or perhaps it was other way around and we just didn't get it — either way, we were as entertained as we were confused.

Donning his trademark cheap tux and exaggerated comb-over, Hamburger came onstage and showered us with side-splitting anti-joke after anti-joke, proving that he's simply unequaled in the art of insult comedy. Over the course of an hour, everyone from Scientologists to dead celebrities became targets of Hamburger's merciless raillery. Jokes making fun of stillborns in the Osmond family and speculating about Michael Jackson molesting Jett Travolta in heaven proved that no cultural figure, dead or alive, was safe from the wrath.

While Hamburger's set was rife with updated material, he didn't shy away from playing the hits, including his litany of jokes about Colonel Sanders, Madonna, Smashmouth, Nickelback and our new favorite: "What's worse than 9/11? 311." His cruelest joke was either the one falsely reporting the death of Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler or having Tom Green come out to do 20 minutes of his own stand-up in place of a second encore.

An intoxicated Green, who'd earlier graced the stage to join Daiquiri on a cover of Wham!'s "Everything She Wants," treated us to a painfully awkward set of jokes about, among other things, his short-lived marriage to Drew Barrymore and how his career has been reduced to producing television shows in his living room. Since Green was filming us from the stage, let's just hope his performance was an elaborate prank, and that we're all the butt of a joke on the level of his classic (no joke) Freddie Got Fingered.

Night of Columbus

If you tell people from Ohio that maybe some people didn't come to their show because of the snow that fell four days ago, they will probably laugh. If those people from Ohio are in the band Times New Viking, it will be a good-natured guffaw, a mildly jolly chortle, a bemused but friendly shrug. So yeah, there weren't as many people at The Basement Monday night as a Times New Viking fan might have hoped for or expected, but those who did make it out got a real treat for their effort.

We walked in to see local trio Ocelots midset, laying down their mixture of big-bottom bass, arpeggiated double-time guitar and interlocking block-rocking beats. We didn't feel let down by either the cellar they were playing in or the ghost of '90s indie rock that inhabits their music. In fact, we were happy to hear that the last few songs — "a little more song-y than I remember Ocelots being," a friend of The Spin remarked — are being recorded for a new EP due out sometime this year.

The Ben Folds Award for Curiously Wrong Song Selection goes to last night's sound mixologist, who sent the O.G. "Bitches Ain't Shit" through the house speakers while Heavy Cream set up their gear. Seriously. (?) Speaking of the Cream that is Heavy, they've benefited from playing an average of every other day for the last year — by night's end they were about 18 hours away from load-in for their next gig — and Jessica McFarland has the deadliest stare of any singer in Nashville. They ripped through a quick set of punk jams as a gaggle of house show regulars tried to work off the school-night blahs.

A lot of times, the question when you see a band is, "Can they sound as good live as they do on their albums?" In the case of Times New Viking, the question is more like, "Can they sound as shitty?" The answer is yes! Now, to clarify: By "shitty" what we mean is "blown-out and totally awesome."

Drummer Adam Elliott was a ball of spazzed-up energy. After an opening noise-rock salvo, he shouted, "So that was three songs — I know, these don't seem like songs! Onetwothreefour!" And then we all got launched back into the hyperfuzz blast furnace, as Elliott, keyboardist Beth Murphy and guitarist Jared Phillips wailed and bashed their way through a kick-ass set — including a song dedicated to Brad Paisley (a no-show, despite the TNV album Present the Paisley Reich) and another one about "doing mushrooms in Buffalo." When Phillips broke a string mid-song, he pulled out an identical backup (always a classy move) and the band, after discussing it briefly, picked up roughly where they'd left off. Seth from Natural Child volunteered to swap out the broken string while the band played on. Everybody was happy.

This week we've got 10 artists to watch for in 2010 — stay tuned next week for our new cover package, "11 Bands to Ignore." Or just email thespin@nashvillescene.com.