By DCist contributor Dave Weigel

What’s the opposite of insult comedy? We know how to react when a has-been (sorry, “classic entertainer”) like Don Rickles points out fat people and tries to get them crying, or when ironic comics like Zach Galifiankis or Neil Hamburger blow up in righteous anger at their audiences.

But what do you call it when a comic wants to be your pal? The audience at Stella’s show at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue could have doubled for the crowd at a median Black Cat show, but with fewer beards and more earnestness. They clutched DVDs of Wet Hot American Summer or the Stella TV show, and if they didn’t come with merch, they shopped for Soviet realist posters of the comic group and faint beige T-shirts with their logo and cute-nerd faces.

These people were dedicated fans. The cult of Stella dates back to 1993, when group members Michael Ian Black, David Wain, and Michael Showalter formed 29 percent of the writing and acting staff of the MTV skit show The State. The show ended in 1995, but when David Wain makes an offhand reference to an upcoming DVD collection, the crowd’s cheers are deafening.

Black, Wain, and Showalter formed Stella in 1998, and have toured and put out skits even as their careers in more mainstream movies and TV shows have taken off. When Wain refers “my last movie, Role Models,” there’s a murmur of surprise: the movie is by far the most commercially successful that any Stella member has been involved with. As popular as they’ve become, Stella still draw the kinds of fans who wear fake mustaches, to prove that they remember jokes from a show that ran for one season in 2005.

The arrangement keeps everybody happy, even the opening acts. Eugene Mirman gave the room a truncated, 20-minute set, only a little bit recycled from his May set at the Arlington Draft House. Mirman treated the crowd like a group of friends he wanted to impress with the cool stuff he’d just read. “Before the election,” Mirman said, “I read an article in The New York Times about people in Philadelphia—in Fishtown—who were racist, but were still going to vote for Barack.” He let the people from Philadelphia “woo!” for a moment, then reacted to the article that dozens (or hundreds) of people in the room had probably read, too. “’Well, I don’t want him to pass all those laws for the blacks, but at least he’ll save my pension.’ As if he’s going to pass a bunch of black laws. ‘From now on, Wednesday will be called basketball!’”

Almost half of Mirman’s set consisted of him reading out polls and forms he’d filled out on the Internet, a disturbing/hilarious number of them goofing on racism. A Classmates.com survey asked him what city he wanted to live in. “A candy city that floats on the back of an eagle,” he said. “And is heavily segregated!” Mirman ambled off the stage without looking like he’d tried too hard, confident that he and the crowd had connected anyway.

Stella’s act was more rigidly planned, but the goal was the same: Make the audience feel like pals. Wain, Showalter, and Black gave the crowd ground rules like “number eight—feelin’ great” and “number nine—doin’ fine.” Since they were in a synagogue they asked the crowd to put away their swastikas. “I drew four extra lines on mine,” said Wain, pointing to his stomach, “so it just looks like a window.”

“I drew action lines on mine,” said Black, pointing to the small of his back. “Now it looks like a windmill.”

“That’s very green.”

”I’m a green nazi!”

The skits, such as they were, ran together and stuck to the general theme of “three guys acting strange.” They weren’t afraid to milk a joke. In a skit about the group’s “favorite party jams,” the ostensible joke was that Wain got on his groove to depressing acoustic ballads like “Tears in Heaven.”

“It’s about Eric Clapton’s son falling off a building!” said Black.

“And into a party!”

But Black got the biggest laugh when he danced to “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by holding his legs still and waving his arms like a balloon mascot outside of a car dealership. It killed. When Black got two more chances to show off (one of them in a joke about sexual positions), he deployed the car dealership dance.

There were slow, jokeless patches, whenever the group got to into its schtick of confusing words and names. When in doubt, there were dick jokes (like an extended series of “poems” to audience members who wanted them to undo their zippers), and there was mockery of Showalter and Wain. It wasn’t the sort of show that built momentum or hit dizzying heights. The crowd wanted to be with its surreal pals for a while, and for $30, that’s what it got.

After the show, Stella walked downstairs to sign merchandise and introduce a screening of Wet Hot American Summer. The questions were ultra-specific: Was the movie specifically about a Jewish summer camp?

”By definition,” said Black, “summer camp is Jewish.”

”You went to a Jewish summer camp,” said Showalter. “My camp, it just so happened that everyone was Jewish. It wasn’t actually a Jewish summer camp.”

“When I went to visit it,” said Wain, “it had Hebrew names on all the bunks!”

”Yeah,” said Showalter, “everyone who ever went there was Jewish.”

”And only spoke Hebrew,” said Black.