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My brother and I checked out Jonathan Coulton’s show at the Symphony Space in upper Manhattan Friday night. I first heard about the show via Wil Wheaton on Twitter, and snagged a pair of tickets in the balcony near the stage. Symphony Space is a great little venue, and our seats afforded me a nice opportunity to take some photos during the show and capture a pair of songs on video — two of my favorite songs, in fact.

You’ll have to excuse the pixelation and less-than-stellar video/audio quality, as this was recorded on a small Kodak 3X camera.

Along with rickrolling the audience during a performance of “Mr. Fancy Pants,” Coulton was joined on stage for several songs by show openers Paul and Storm, who are former members of Da Vinci’s Notebook, an a cappella group I’ve seen open quite a few different shows in the past. Ukulele musician Kristen Shirts, who won a remix contest Coulton held a while back in which musicians recorded alternate versions of his song “Code Monkeys,” also joined Coulton on stage for a few songs.

Oh, and there was a crazy hippy matching band that joined Coulton for “The Presidents” and his encore performance of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.”

Here’s the ukulele version of “Code Monkeys” performed by Coulton, Shirts, Paul and Storm:

You can also click on the image below for a set of photos from the show.

I can’t say enough about the show, really. I hadn’t heard much of Coulton’s songs prior to Friday night — and really only the funny ones at that. But Friday’s show offered me another side of his music that impressed the heck out of me. This was one of those rare occasions where I only knew about 10 percent of a musician’s work going into the show, but enjoyed 100 percent of the night’s performance.

His ode to journalist George Plimpton, “A Talk With George,” was amazing, but my favorite songs of the night were either “Space Doggity” (a song about the short life and grand adventure of the Sputnik 2 space dog, Laika, that brings me close to tears every time I hear it) or one of my all-time favorite Coulton songs, “The Future Soon,” a geek anthem about looking forward to the day when the threat of getting picked on is engineered away.