Only 39-year-old comedian Demetri Martin can make a Venn diagram funny. He employs guitars, harmonicas, diagrams and illustrations to make his dry one-liners hit harder than your average spoken joke. His show, “Important Things With Demetri Martin” ended in 2010, but on Saturday at 10 p.m. he’s back on Comedy Central for a one-hour stand-up special. In a conference call with college journalists, he told us why he likes dog jokes more than political jokes.

Are politics making their way into your jokes because of election season?

“Not really. I spent a bunch of time in California and I listened to NPR more because

I’ve been in a car more than I was in New York, so I feel more aware of politics, but

I don’t naturally gravitate to politics as something that I find funny. I find it kind of overwhelming and really frustrating.

“I was a White House intern at the Clinton White House when I was in law school the summer of ’96. And that was probably when I knew the most about politics because I spent the summer in D.C., and I just found it overwhelming. I had friends who can write tons of material about politics and get a lot of creative work out of it. I don’t know why, but I find it really disillusioning and it just kind of overwhelms me. And I think irresponsibly I’ve often veered away from it.

“Working at The Daily Show when I did was an interesting experience because Jon Stewart used to always talk about relevance and how important it was to make sure any piece on the show had relevance; it was relevant to the larger kind of conversations in our culture, and often it was, of course, about politics. So that was cool. That was a good kind of course in that for me, but I think my natural state is kind of more irresponsible and kind of disconnected from topical stuff as we call it, you know.

“Twitter of course lends itself to topical material and people put a lot of stuff on there about whatever’s happening. It’s built for that, right, I mean there are ‘trending topics’ and then people try to talk about it. That’s cool, I mean some people really get energized by that, but I like writing stuff that’s about like dogs or chairs or trees, you know, stuff that’s not going to change too much anytime soon. So that, I don’t know, maybe I’m tapping into something that feels a little more immediate, accessible, simple, and has a longer shelf life.”

Contact Kelsey Misbrener at [email protected].