Todd Snider sings at The Bing

Todd Snider is often described as a folk singer, but that barely touches the surface.

“The man is a troubadour for our times, an inventive cross of Dylan and Kristofferson with just the right dash of Tom Petty thrown in,” wrote Ann Patchett last year in The New York Times.

He’s more often compared to John Prine, Randy Newman and Arlo Guthrie. In fact, he’s sometimes even compared to Hunter S. Thompson.

He’s a satirist and class clown who has gotten plenty of laughs during his appearances on Leno and Letterman. His songs have names like “Ballad of the Kingsmen,” “Combover Blues” and “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues.”

The latter contains the lines, “We’ve got bad attitudes and what’s more / When we play we stare straight down at the floor” and “Well they made us do a video, but that wasn’t tough / ‘Cause we just filmed ourselves smashing stuff.”

In “Beer Run,” Snider sings: “Oh how happy we would be, if we had only brought a better fake ID.”

Yet he’s not just a comedian. His songs are loaded with sharp social commentary; he has one particularly cutting song about George W. Bush titled “You Got Away With It.”

Snider, a Portland, native, says his role model is Chuck Berry.

“He’s probably my favorite artist ever – painter, actor, singer, anything,” Snider told the Arizona Republic earlier this year.

In the same interview, he said that his humor flows from his sometimes unfortunate tendency to laugh at just about anything. Even when he got mugged in an alley, he thought it was funny.

“I was like, ‘I can’t believe you guys are robbing me. This is hysterical.’ Then, whang, I got hit with a gun,” he said.

Naturally, he got a song out of it, “The Highland Street Incident,” which tells the story from the point of view of his muggers.

Saturday’s opening act will be local singer-songwriter Kristen Marlo.