Quirky comedian Maria Bamford brings her off-kilter stylings to Spokane

Maria Bamford’s comedy has always been a little off-kilter. She makes bizarre, guttural noises. She contorts her face. She implements voices and inflections that are quite unlike her own high-pitched, Midwestern accent. Bamford’s material is gleefully surreal and sometimes quite dark, and her seemingly timid disposition makes it all the stranger and all the funnier.

“I was on this radio show,” Bamford says near the end of her 2013 stand-up album, “Ask Me About My New God,” “and the guy did not like my stylings. … What he said was, ‘Whoa, I don’t get it! Apparently this woman’s supposed to be funny. I just think she is schizophrenic.’

“Well, that is clearly not my mental illness,” she continues. “I am Bipolar II, which is the new gladiator sandal.”

During that brief bit, Bamford revolves through three different voices, and her delivery is both unhinged and completely controlled. You can see the quirky comedian in action at the Spokane Comedy Club on Sunday, and although she tours pretty frequently, Bamford says the workaday schedule of a typical stand-up comedian is thankfully far behind her.

“There’s a billion shows a week in Los Angeles, and you can go and do three shows in a night,” she said during a recent phone interview. “But I’m in no hurry. It’s like …” – she switches over to a deliberately canned speech pattern – “ ‘What’s next while you’re doing this? Are you scissor kicking while you’re also doing another type of kicking?’ I’m no multitasker. I did see that documentary about Tony Robbins, and I’m no Tony Robbins. I’m not dunking myself in 50-degree water every morning.

“But I get a good, solid 10 hours of sleep. I don’t know if it’s meds or getting older or a combination of the two.”

Watching Bamford’s stand-up, it’s sometimes difficult to tell if her wide-eyed demeanor is merely a put-on. But speaking to her as she walks through her neighborhood on a sunny Thursday afternoon, it becomes clear that she’s as sharp and self-deprecating as her stage persona.

“If you’ve seen me in the past three years, you have probably heard some of this material,” Bamford said of her current stand-up set. “You might say, ‘I’ve heard two of those. That’s so disappointing.’ So I’ll be disappointing to you, I’m sure, in some way. I can guarantee you that.”

Bamford doesn’t analyze her comedy too closely – “I remember being shocked that there were any thoughtful reviews of comedy; in stage listings, we used to be listed between karaoke and strip clubs,” she says – but her affinity for wacky voices, faces and sounds likely stems from what she refers to as “the whoopee cushion aspect of comedy.”

“I think there’s a craft to building a whoopee cushion. They’re very delicate, and you can only use one about two times and then they’ll explode,” Bamford said. “I love words, and I love trying, within myself, to get to a feeling of exactly what I wanted to say, even if nobody else understands it. I feel like, ‘Ah, yeah, that’s the sound. That’s the word I was looking for,’ whatever it is. That’s what’s so exciting.”

Bamford has had prominent TV roles and has racked up an impressive voice acting résumé, but her biggest gig thus far is the self-referential, semi-autobiographical Netflix series “Lady Dynamite,” which was recently picked up for a second season. Created by Mitch Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”) and Pam Brady (“South Park”), the irreverent series stars the comedian as a through-the-looking-glass version of herself, and its fusion of a manic showbiz sitcom and a somber examination of mental illness make it distinctly Bamford-esque.

“I was anxious about anyone else speaking for me,” Bamford said. “I love stand-up because there’s this perceived sense of control. … If the ship goes down, it’s because I sunk it. I tried rewriting a script and I thought, ‘This is not my first skill. Maybe it’s just best to leave this to the professionals.’ And I did, and it worked out pretty well. I think they did a really beautiful job of getting my voice.”