Where to start with a legendary comic like Emo Philips? The 63-year-old comedian is known for overly drawn-out speech patterns in which his voice often careens into a falsetto register. Perpetually sporting a stringy bob haircut, Philips has an on-stage persona combining childlike amusement with darkly twisted jokes. He’s a master of the paraprosdokian setup — that is, an innocuous opener that gets turned on its head in the punch line. For example, Philips once famously quipped, “When I die, I want to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather — not screaming, like the passengers in his car.” Philips performs Thursday through Saturday, December 5 through 7, at the Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington.
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