Dispatch from press tour: Demetri Martin makes some funnies

Yesterday was a rare off day in the middle of press tour, as no channel wanted to present on the day of the Golden Globes. After spending much of Sunday getting caught up on writing (when I wasn't busy tearing my hair out at Giants-Eagles), I'm going to be running around to a bunch of set visits today, highlighted by a stop at the "CSI" set a few days before William Petersen's final episode.

So since I have no sessions from yesterday to report on, and since I'll be out and about pretty much all of today, I thought I'd revisit a session from last week that I wanted to write up but never found a chance to: Comedy Central's "Important Things with Demetri Martin," which premieres on February 11th.

Martin's the latest "Daily Show" correspondent to get promoted into his own series, and based on both the very funny pilot for "Important Things" and the equally funny press conference, he looks to be worthy of the gig.

"Important Things" is a mix of sketches, stand-up, music and animation, with each episode built around a topic that can be very broad (power) or very narrow (chairs). As Martin put it, "It's a good show, and it's thing-oriented."

I'll be writing more about it closer to the debut, but in the meantime, a few highlights from the session:

• Martin rattled off a series of little-known facts, including that "Most castles in America are located in fish tanks... So we have what is called a submerged monarchy in the United States."

• Martin made extensive use of his trademark sketch pad (which is a key part of the series) to show us various diagrams, including an empty circle that he described as "a pie chart about procrastination."

• In talking about his target audience, he said he ideally would like the whole world to watch, but will settle for America.

"Then I started thinking, okay, we have about 300 million people in the country. Look, realistically if I get a third of those people, that�s a hundred million people watching this show. So that�s great. That takes a lot of pressure off because that means 200 million people I don�t even care about, 200 million people can hate the show and it really doesn�t matter. I can disregard that two-third right off the top. So we�re going just for the hundred million that are the core of my demo."

Do you want to be one of those 200 million who are outside his core demo? I don't think so.