On the scene: Maria Bamford at the Lakeshore Theater

Warning: Reading this blog post of comic Maria Bamford's performance this past weekend at the Lakeshore Theater will not sufficiently re-create or do justice to the L.A.-based comic's sublime and praiseworthy performance—but it will do its best.

I knew it was a good sign Saturday night when both the ticket teller at the box office and the usher were gushing effusively over Bamford's Friday performances. But despite the beaming staffers, I was not expecting I'd be on my feet two hours later applauding wildly in standing ovation. Yet from the moment local comic Carrie Callahan (very funny and in wonderful form on Saturday) handed the mike over to Bamford, I was pretty much enthralled.

Bamford is a comic of wonderful vocal prowess, the kind you wish you could hear emanating from a scratchy vinyl record. Her own mumbly, squeaky voice sounds lifted from a Pixar movie, but when she breaks from this cartoon cadence to play it straight, it delivers in spades. Often she issues these impressions in conversational style, as in the kind that she, as the perennially awkward and fumbling outcast, might have with a person of success and hubris. In one of the evening's opening bits for example, Bamford laments those annoying people in so-called "perfect" relationships that we all know and hate. "We met and we just knew!" Bamford exclaims in pseudo-confident trixie persona. "But don't you ever fight?" Bamford mumbles sheepishly. "He doesn't like onions!" she fires back.

Bamford has fine tuned these impressions, so much so that the slightest alteration delivers an entirely new character. As Bamford mused about love and relationships she dropped her voice a few notches to revealed a gravel-throated nonagenarian afraid of commitment. Seconds later she slipped into lite-FM radio mode as she uttered a razor-sharp impression of the saccharine and ubiquitously syndicated love-song guru Delilah.

Bamford's current favorite target, her sister, popped up frequently during the one-hour set, usually in the form of the nagging, wiser sibling who's constantly trying to bully Bamford while extolling the virtues of self-help junk food like Ekhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Bamford also talked about joining a meetup group to learn a foreign language, but noticed how no one in these groups ever seems to know the desired language. She bragged that she's a fifth generation English speaker with such a mastery of our language that she's able to teach people colloquialisms like, "Why vote? Who cares? It doesn't matter." She then drew her own map of the world with her hand pointing first to South Africa, "Oprah's teaching them makeovers," then central Africa, "They're killing each other because they haven't learned The Secret," then China, "We make things! We make things!," Eastern Europe, "They're all practicing gymnastics so they can somersault out of there," and so forth until she ended with her own satirical take on the U.S.A.

Bamford's world is one dominated by Kafkaesque workplaces, overbearing family members and her own expansive neuroses. In the evening's finest moment, she confesses her darkest thoughts to a telephone operator (ridiculously deadpan and funny) and for a finale discussed connecting with her uber-religious parents by leaving messages on their answering machine in the voice of the baby Jesus.

So does any of this translate? If not, click here for one her best clips. Otherwise, just get your ass to the Lakeshore next time the alt-comic maven comes to town and see for yourself how good—make that great—she is.