[video] Paul & Storm at PAX East 2012

Aw, were Paul and Storm bitter about having to play right before that great bastion of nerd-rock, Jonathan Coulton? Probably not, because they got quite the crowd on their own, rendering this tongue-in-cheek song about openings acts a bit out of place. The Main Stage was at capacity for the Saturday night concert on the PAX East mainstage, so there were 4,000 nerds rocking out to Paul and Storm, happy to throw pieces of their Portal 2 cosplays at the pair, if not pairs of panties. (Watch the video; you'll see. No, really, you just have to see it.)

Their second song, "Thanksgiving," provoked less object-throwing and more agreeable cheering from the audience, for reasons that will also become obvious when you hear the lyrics.

Almost the entire rest of Paul and Storm's set was spent on a "TED talk" about humor, complete with power-point presentation. I've never seen these two perform live before, but I wasn't expecting a hilarious diversion into stand-up comedy (it was allegedly a talk to-be-hopefully-considered by TED, but ... nah, it was stand-up). It sounded from their introduction that it was a talk they prepared specifically for the PAX audience, which is too bad, because non-PAX folks might also enjoy the pair's bizarre break-down of an internet meme they co-created. The two mostly discussed the idea of "crossing the line" in comedy, which could have ended up going in all sorts of bad directions (this is, after all, a con hosted by the men who invented Dickwolves). And yet, the talk managed to be hilarious, clever, and unexpectedly inoffensive. So, props to Paul & Storm for managing that. Here's hoping someone else captured the entire talk online ... I'm sure it'll be on the TED website any day now.