The Wham City Comedy Tour, last night at the Paragraph Gallery

The long setup to last night’s big joke started months ago when Wham City’s man in Kansas City — Joe Hammers — called the Baltimore avant-slacker comedy troupe into town to perform its big variety show at the Paragraph Gallery. Actually, the funniest thing about the Wham City Comedy Tour was that the end — the punch line — was set up from the very beginning: As Dan Deacon’s Wham City Tour bus lurched toward Kansas City at 50 mph, running on hot vegetable oil, Hammers was writing a sketch to be performed at the climax of the night.

The whole show before that sketch was all comedy: self-deprecating stand-up, sick one-liners, dark sketches, Internet glitches, mock movie trailers, hellish commercials, even the singing fool of 16th-century England. The troupe and its members are 12 comedy-savvy comics who performed nearly 20 bits — some lengthy, some brief, some hit, some miss — in two hours.