At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday, January 17

The king of all nerds is an impostor. At least he’s covered it up well by dressing, by his own admission, like a douchebag, complete with tousled hair and skinny jeans. But I guess that’s how you end up getting a succession of models as girlfriends (three out of the last four, according to Wikipedia).

On-stage, though, he’s neither nerd nor douchenozzle. The host of Talking Dead and @midnight on TV as well as the podcast The Nerdist, Chris Hardwick is both likable and funny. His jokes weren’t just an endless recitation of pop-culture references and inside jokes like you might hear on his and other podcasts. Sure, he mentioned Back to the Future and a quick TARDIS aside, but he’s got to throw a bone to his core fans. That’s as current as it got for the 43-year-old, though.

His material on the Funcomfortable tour was a nice mixture of personal and observational. On the former, he talked about his compulsion to say inappropriate things (such as requesting butt sex with his girlfriend through his tears on the day his father died) and about being an oversharer, which led to the story of him losing his virginity to a blowup doll. As he was blowing it up, he said, “You will give me love; I will give you life.”

On the latter, he called Montreal “practice France”, forced us to consider the ugly truth that all our mothers have had jizz on them at some point, and called kids “sex trophies”.

He was full of good lines. He hasn’t ascended to his position of influence in show business just because there’s a need for nerd content. A million others could fill that void if that’s all it took. He’s also equipped with a quick wit. That was on display when he alternately sat on the edge of the stage at the Chan Centre and laid down as he talked to people in the front row, which also served to send his likability quotient through the roof.

The first person he spoke with worked in a lumberyard, which Hardwick thought was so Canadian. That led to a number of lumber callbacks with other audience members: a picture-framer packaged the lumber, and the father of an eight-month-old fetus distributed the lumber.

With openers Chris James and April Richardson, the evening was a rousing success for Yuk Yuk’s Vancouver’s first outside-the-club presentation. The local James got big laughs with his small-budget jokes, and Richardson, who is based in L.A., received the love she apparently never got as an only child.

It’s been seven years since Hardwick last performed here, and then it was with his musical comedy duo Hard ’n Phirm. It was a treat to see what he was able to do on his own, without a guitar. He’s one funny pseudo-douchebag nerd.