Every once in a while Joel Brussell puts together a half-hour medley of his favorite gags and musical offerings. This piece, the latest installment from a Michigander Dostoyevsky might have called "The Underground Man," compiles the inimitably wacky Brussell's obsessions with ticks and litigation. If we are besieged with litigious people who would drain our lifeblood, Brussell besieges us with quips about blood and bloodsuckers as off-the-wall as any you've ever heard from Uncle Feodor.

Trust me, there's method to Brussell's madness, especially in modest dollops. His shorter interstitials and drop-ins are more in line with what public radio listeners are accustomed to in this conservative year of our Lord, 2007. For example, his piece, "Fleas and Ticks Theater Presents 'Omlette,' (sic) A Jewish version of Hamlet Adapted for the Jewish Stage," rehearses his tick shtick in three minutes and may be more suitable for Bush-Cheney, let alone Clinton-Obama, audiences, than the sometimes self-indulgent "Show #37."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Brussell's outside-of-the-box goofiness, his relentless puns and plangent spoofs, are innovative to the nth degree, so much so that at times even I cringe when listening to him. But then I tell myself that I probably would have cringed and been scandalized upon hearing the premiere performance of Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps," with its boom-boom audacity. I probably would have cringed upon first viewing the ever-controversial "Guernica" by Picasso -- or reading, for the first time, that KEY RAY ZEE author, Feodor Dostoyevsky. I realize that it's a stretch to compare Brussell to these giants; Lenny Bruce might be a better person to consider here: Bruce vs. Brussell.

Joel Brussell's oddball humor is at least a decade ahead of us. With any luck, by 2027 let's hope we've grown to wildly appreciate him -- even his outrageous misspellings -- and see his work as seminal, sui generis.