Fred Armisen performs during SF Sketchfest at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 27, 2023. Photos by Jakub Mosur.

SAN FRANCISCO — Musician and comedian Fred Armisen performed a mix of music and standup comedy for the first of three sold-out dates with his show Comedy for Bass Players Friday at Great American Music Hall. His biggest bass flex came when Primus bassist and frontman Les Claypool joined him onstage as a special guest for a skit that required a volunteer from the audience, and various bass-related shenanigans.

Claypool provided several impressions of famous bassists after explaining that he recently hung out with one of his heroes, Rush’s Geddy Lee, and that Lee had shown him the proper way to play classic prog-rock tune “YYZ” (which Claypool admitted he’d been playing wrong for years).

Claypool then played the riff, both the right way and the wrong way. The joke was that neither Armisen or the audience could hear the difference. Claypool delivered The Who bassist John Entwhistle’s fills from “My Generation” with increasing virtuosity until his shredding sounded more like Eddie Van Halen than Entwhistle. Later Claypool’s McCartney chugged through the iconic riff from “Tax Man.”

Earlier in the performance, Fred Armisen warmed the crowd up with a number of his own impressions including:

• guys struggling to dance to the strange rhythms of math rock
• musicians walking around Target
• bored people standing in line at Disney World while dramatic movie music plays around them

Then Armisen strapped on an electric guitar and demonstrated the different strumming patterns for folk music around the world. Highlights included Armisen’s jokes that “Italian musicians pick a tempo that doesn’t actually exist” and “In Norway it’s as if they’re trying to show you how to play the guitar while they’re playing the guitar.”

Armisen opened the show with a pianist and drummer, playing upright bass on a jazz song called “Autumn,” which he explained was by Alexander Olafsen. The audience cheered as he soloed over the mellow jazz tune. Later in the set, he revealed he had made up both the song and the artist.

“I can never really hear the notes played on the bass in a jazz song, so I wanted to see if I could just play anything,” he said.

Armisen delivered his lesson on the history of punk music, made famous by his appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” He also broke down the way his own sound and style as a drummer has evolved over the years. Late in the performance, Armisen went up and down the West Coast, demonstrating the minute differences in regional accents and dialects.

“People in Seattle talk like they’re presenting words on a platter,” Armisen said, demonstrating the wild gesticulations. “People in SoCal pronounce every single part of the word. … People in Oakland wanna learn, they’re like ‘Teach Me!'” The exaggerated earnestness earned huge laughs from the sold-out room.

Armisen closed out the 75-minute set by taking requests for songs he wrote for “Saturday Night Live,” where he worked as a cast member for 11 years, and “Portlandia,” the sketch comedy show he did with Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein from 2011 to 2018. The audience laughed and sang along with his punk character Ian Rubbish’s musical tribute to Margaret Thatcher, as well as father’s punk song “Fistfight in the Parking Lot,” to be played at his daughter’s wedding.

Armisen continues his three-night residency at Great American Music Hall with special guests Mike Dirnt of Green Day and Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/saxum_paternus.