Born Philip Soltanec in Chicago in 1956, Emo Philips built one of the most distinctive acts in American stand-up: a childlike, fidgeting persona and a high falsetto delivering carefully engineered paraprosdokians — sentences whose final words force you to re-read everything before them. His 1985 debut album E=MO², recorded live at Caroline’s in Manhattan for Epic Records, won that year’s New Music Award for best comedy album. His jokes are so tightly built that they detach cleanly from their author and travel the internet unsigned — which is exactly how one of them ended up wearing Steve Jobs’ name.