Jeff Tweedy rolled into this waterlogged Oregon college town four nights into his 15-date solo acoustic tour and proceeded to slay an appreciative McDonald Theatre crowd with two hours of stand-up punctuated by the odd musical interlude. While this move into new creative territory represents a potentially risky move for the Wilco frontman, it’s nevertheless a development that appears to be paying dividends as he preps for the full band’s spring tour later this year (or made for a more entertaining night for Tweedy personally, if nothing else).

From a critical perspective, it’s much tougher to render a review of a comedian’s live repertoire (the whole “It was funny, really, it was!” thing doesn’t come across very well when missing both the delivery and timing of the material involved) than it is to merely pass judgment on a batch of songs we’ve all heard on record before but have been streamlined for live performance. Nevertheless, I’ll do my utmost to faithfully recast the best bits from Tweedy’s evening-long funnyman routine:

Surrounded by guitars of various vintages and makes, a chair upon which the evening’s setlist sat wedged under an effects pedal, and half of opener and fellow Wilco traveler Glenn Kotche’s trap kit, Tweedy opened with a humorous gambit in which he compared the voices coming from the darkened audience floor to those he occasionally hears inside his head. Some, he said, were eerily similar to his own interior monologue (“Play Pieholden Suite!” “Heavy Metal Drummer!” “Black Eye, Black Eye!”) while others, he drolly noted, were not (“We love you, Jeff!” “You’re so insightful!”).

“Those things, I pretty much never hear, ever,” he said. “Except maybe the ‘I love Wilco’ one. ’Cause I do mostly love Wilco.”

In a tidy bit of performance art intended to puncture the fourth wall between the singer and his audience, Tweedy then went on to reveal that this was about the “fifth time I’ve done this bit,” which indicated a relative degree of practice and comfort in relating his opening story. That said, he openly fretted that for the people following him from gig to gig, such repetition might “not be living up to expectations—if you eat filet mignon every night, at some point, you’re gonna get really fuckin’ sick of filet mignon. And ladies and gentlemen, I am filet mignon, the best cut of meat known to man.”

Several songs later, Tweedy approached the mic rather sheepishly and apologized for “being so boastful earlier. I’m not really filet mignon. More like a strip steak. Or, hell, probably chorizo,” which then led to a brief discussion about the menu for this tour, which seems single-mindedly fixated on a favorite brand of frozen enchilada currently filling the entirety of Tweedy’s tour bus refrigerator/freezer. This unfortunately digressed into a scatological description of the smell of said tour bus a mere four nights into the tour (what’s a night of comedy without at least one fart joke?) and was singled out as the reason for Tweedy’s vocal fluff on the seldom-heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era demo “Cars Can’t Escape:” “Goddamned enchiladas,” spat Tweedy sarcastically.

Our hero finally got around to copping to what had obviously been bothering him all night, which Tweedy later admitted was really a carryover from his gig the night before in Portland: “My voice is a little hoarse from having to sing over all the talkers,” he pointed out rather testily. “I think we should divide the world up into the listeners and the non-listeners. No, really, you guys are fine—sort of—it’s just that last night I kind of had a hissyfit on stage because when people shut up and let me sing, I can sing like a bird, really, and we can have a beautiful time together. When we’re all just listening to me … sing.” He composed himself and then delivered the punchline like a simultaneous uppercut to both his jaw and the audience’s: “I think I’m probably just a dick. You’re listening pretty quietly. So shut up.”

Like all of our most compelling comedians, Tweedy’s humor is colored with a pretty serious undercurrent of barbed-wire anger. He knows how to handle hecklers and others he deems random or beneath him. Some jokester shouted out a request for “Tequila” and Tweedy immediately fired back “I don’t drink, sir. I went through rehab, it was in all the papers, maybe you’ve read about it?” Throughout the rest of the evening, he half-jokingly asked the audience to “police themselves” and then told someone who yelled out a predictably cheap George Bush putdown that his throwaway was “too easy. If you really want to help, go do something about it. Stop complaining about the guy and go feed one of those homeless people digging through the trash outside, trying to find their dinner.” Surprisingly (Eugene’s legendary liberal streak remains slightly to the left of Berkeley’s circa 1968), Tweedy got an ovation for his tete-a-tete with the Bush-basher. Having spent a few formative years in the place (a town not only characterized by its left-leaning politics but also home to a scarily growing number of militant anarchists), this represented a first for me, at least in a public forum.

Solo tours such as this afford artists like Tweedy the opportunity to take the kind of chances he’d never remotely consider with his Wilco™ brand. Aside from the occasionally radical sonic reconstruction (“Muzzle Of Bees,” which sounded only vaguely like the version heard on A Ghost Is Born) and loose-limbed banter, Tweedy encouraged the audience to sing along with him during the chorus to his new song “Is That The Thanks I Get?” (not to mention the entirety of “Shot In The Arm,” when he blanked on the lyrics after attempting to restart the tune twice) and dug up rarities from his past such as “Please Tell My Brother,” a plaintive folk tune from his Golden Smog side project that is very plainly indebted to Wilco’s various Woody Guthrie detours and contains one of the most personal familial references in his catalogue: “Please tell my father to forget the railroad and all those bills/Head for the cooler, and drink your fill.”

All recent conversation about Tweedy’s obsession with post-modern skronk and krautrock aside, a show this deceptively simple can only be described as a direct descendent of the sort of revue repertoire that has long graced the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. For all his Dylanesque posturing (including a poke at himself for such pretensions on the cheeky “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard”), Tweedy’s shtick better embodies the sort of dichotomy once represented by Hank Williams’ old Luke The Drifter character—a guy whose talking blues were given a different name than his “musical persona” so that the pop-loving fans of one wouldn’t be confused by the more abstract artistry of the other. Like Hank Sr. before him, Tweedy can sing tossed-off, audience-pleasing ditties about honky-tonkin’ good times (“Heavy Metal Drummer”) or odes to aimless drifting and the attendant self-loathing (“Sunken Treasure”). He can also flip a switch to explore spiritual terrain in which his remorse and longing for grander meaning (“Theologians,” the sublime “Airline To Heaven,” and the Dylan-like surrealist overview of Loose Fur’s “The Ruling Class,” which imagines Christ as a drifting, semi-visible street urchin with a drug habit and party-down POV) can be infused with the full dose of black humor such ruminations require. Just like Hank Sr.’s “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive” once did. Unlike Hank, Tweedy seems to have discovered that his addictions were carrying him down a similarly dark path and got out of the game just in time.

So herein lies the secret of the new, post-rehab Jeff Tweedy: You’ll come for the folk, but you’ll stay for the jokes.