A road-tested veteran of stage, radio, and small screen, Seattle comic Kermet Apio has won the Great American Comedy Festival and Seattle Comedy Competition contests. Yet in some circles, he’s not very respected. Maybe that’s because Apio’s work lacks edginess and exudes an eminently palatable patina of middlebrow relatability. But within those narrow parameters, Apio excels in the profanity-free realms of family-oriented, self-deprecating humor. Sometimes we need clever truth bombs dropped about the lamentable condition known as being in your 40s or a riff on how absurd it seems now for students in 1970s-era grade-school art class to be making ashtrays. by Dave Segal