But to build a half-hour of comedy around any of them - that's something else completely.
All the more reason for Demetri Martin to be doing it.
As he proves anew in Important Things With Demetri Martin, this rising comic has a gift for the shrewd but daydreamy.
His material tingles with random micro-truths, each observation a dotty shared discovery with his audience.
He's a guy who saw a sign on a door that said: This door must remain closed at all times.
"And I was like, `Dude! You're thinking of a Wall!'."
Or, in this hurry-up world, he envisions a one-hour photo shop put out of business by a 59-minute photo shop.
His chosen important thing is timing.
"Hey, timing is everything," he says, "That's a cliche - now.
"But if I said that a long time ago, I would have been really original."
In one of the episode's sketches, he plays an actor afflicted with poor timing as he tries to film a drama.
In another, Time Gigolo, he's a janitor-on-the-make who uses a time machine to hit on women from the past.
Each edition of Important Things has interstitial comic sequences, animation and Martin doing his stand-up before a studio audience.
Sometimes he accompanies himself on one or more musical instruments, or with his whimsical drawings on a flip chart that stands beside him. (A single pen stroke is labelled:"Unfinished Drawing of Porcupine".)
In performance, the 35-year-old Martin projects a boyish but assured air, a Beatle-like haircut and large brown eyes that seem full of wonder.
Kiwi viewers will recognise him as one half of the Crazy Doggz - the musical rivals from the second series of Flight of the Conchords.
Important Things has been a long time coming.
There were interruptions by the writers' strike and then, a few months later, for his starring role in the Ang Lee comedy Taking Woodstock (due for release this year).
Along the way, he and his creative team were playing trial and error with the series' many elements, which eventually inspired the Important Things format.
"It forces you to say, `Now, what is that joke about? What category could you assign it to?' You start seeing something coagulate around the idea.
"Or it might fuel a cool idea for something else."
Martin used to be a staff writer for Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
He began his occasional "Trendspotting" feature on The Daily Show in 2006 and a year later scored the Comedy Central stand-up special, Demetri Martin.
Person.
This was all quite a departure from his original career track.
But soon after enrolling with certainty (and on full scholarship) at the New York University School of Law, he was racked with doubt.
"So I began reading the transcendentalists - Emerson and Thoreau and all this stuff.
"It led me to the idea of having a calling: `What would I do if I didn't have to worry about money or status or disappointing anybody?' And the answer was: `Well, I like joking around'."
But there was more to the answer than that, which helps explain what sets Martin apart.
A fan of stand-up comic Steven Wright and cartoonist Gary Larson, he says his favourite comedy "seems like art to me.
"Not in a pretentious way, but there's an aesthetic to it.
"I approach comedy that way, kind of make it an art-thing, you know?"
A one-time high school student council president and the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, New Jersey native Martin grew up comfortable in front of people.
"I don't need all the attention, but once I'm up there, I like it," he says.
But he hastens to add that the main part of his job isn't telling jokes for an audience, but recognising comedy as it unfolds in real life.
Just days earlier, he had had a private real-world moment: the awkward, startling instant when your buttocks happen to graze someone else's in a crowded space.
Just how, or if, such a thing might find its way into performance has yet to be seen.
"By the time I tell it to an audience, I hope I've worded it correctly - and that I get a laugh," he says.
