TOO HOT TO HOOT.(comic Demetri Martin)

Demetri Martin is a dark-eyed twenty-nine-year-old from the Jersey Shore with a mop of black hair and a forceful nose. He is a palindromist, an anagrammatist, an amateur inventor, and, most visibly these days, an ascendant comedian. (He has performed on "Late Show with David Letterman" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," and appears for about thirty seconds in "Analyze That.") In his shows, he likes to rearrange the letters of his name: he is, he says, a "mired, trite man." Another permutation of his name sometimes occurs to him on seeing well-proportioned members of the opposite sex: "Trim T-'n'-A, ride me." Demetri's most daring reshuffling to date may be a work that he calls "All the Words Printed on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order," which reads, in part:

Women, your ability to operate extra

tender springs from birth., Good machinery comes as your contents, cause enjoyment., Cash, beer, a car: rock and rolling., During "it," the general warning:, "We may risk pregnancy according to old, problems."

During Demetri's junior year of college, at Yale, he began composing "Dammit, I'm Mad," which he believes is one of the longest, non-computer-generated, sensemaking palindromes in English. (It's a monologue in the voice of an alcoholic mailman, a narrative frame that does allow Demetri some liberties, such as "Ew, a spider . . . eh?," which mirrors letters embedded in an earlier phrase, "Elsewhere dips a web.") The poem originated in a fractals class. It was a hundred and fifty words long, and the professor was so excited by it that he sent it to Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish-born fractician. Since then, the poem has grown to two hundred and twenty-three words; it has multiple internal palindromes, on the level of the line, the sentence, and the individual word.

Demetri grew up doing puzzle books in class, working at his parents' souvlaki stand, and performing in his church's Greek-dance troupe. After Yale, he went to law school for a while but dropped out to do standup. He started out doing long-winded absurdist ...