She pokes fun of herself for being predictable, but in fact she’s anything but. She’ll take you in a direction you think you understand, but then take a hard left turn into impaling an orca on an 800-mile-an-hour runaway train car directed by a ghost-toilet, and that’s where the comedic genius comes from.

In case you couldn’t tell from the reference to dead whales and haunted toilet train cars, she begins with a bang by addressing the current political situation. Pundits galore have remarked on how great it must be to be a comic right now, but while there is of course plenty of material to fuel the Trevor Noahs and Samantha Bee’s of the world, that material is in fact nightmare fuel for the rest of us. Jokes are great for lightening the mood when you’re momentarily stuck underground on public transit, but the political landscape we find ourselves in is far more terrifying than that. Heller’s tactful sidestep into instead describing exactly how terrifying things are through a New York City subway metaphor was both the highlight of the night and the best articulation of my own terror I’ve heard since the election. I watched her set twice in a row and laughed just as hard the second time as the first.

Having cleansed the audience’s palates in such a spectacular way, Heller abruptly announces that that’s why she will not be doing any more political jokes and moves on to talk about how predictable she is. She’d made it clear from the beginning that the entire point of that first narrative was to demonstrate why she’s not telling political jokes, but it was so engrossing that I couldn’t have predicted that we’d ever leave it.

This is the mastery of Emily Heller: she presents us with topics we might expect from a comedian in general like politics and therapy as well as topics we might expect from someone like her in particular such as boyfriends, online dating, body image, and vegetarianism, but she masterfully subverts our expectations at every turn. We’re used to hearing people go on about the noble reasons they choose vegetarianism, but from Emily Heller we get possibly the least dignified answer possible. We’re used to a society that tells us that women can only talk about their struggles with shame and attempts to lose weight when the subject of body image comes up, but Heller completely subverts that expectation. As a woman-perceived person who has myself struggled with body shame in the past, Heller’s assertion that she has no body shame at all (because her profession requires her to have no shame period) felt like a breath of fresh air.

If you ever have a chance to see Emily Heller live, I urge you to take it. Her comedy is a gift in and of itself, but she also has a physical gift to give her audiences. If she doesn’t happen to be touring through your city however, don’t worry, last night’s performance was recorded. Stay tuned because her new album will be out soon. In the meantime, her 2015 album “Good For Her,” is already available on Kill Rock Stars.