B.B. King’s Blues Club & Grill in Times Square is an upscale cabaret-style venue that probably attracts as many tourists as regulars, typically booking acts that play well to older and more sedate audiences — a perfect place to host Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, on tour promoting Dan’s mostly excellent new record, Tangled Tales. Since the late 1960s, Dan Hicks has written and performed unique Americana music incorporating country, lounge, Caribbean, Texas swing, and gypsy jazz (to pinpoint a few) — a mix he identified on stage as “Caucasian hip-hop.” But Dan, who Tom Waits once called “fly, sly, wily and dry,” hasn’t made his name through clever genre-bending but through his unmistakable personality and his witty, ironic, downright smart-ass perspective, implicit both in his songs and performance. Playing to the pretense of sophistication at B. B. King’s, the band played a show somewhere between a lounge act and a clown show, consistently undercutting themselves and their audience’s expectations without ever coming off as aggressive or unappreciative. No small feat it was, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Through a pretty even mix of new tunes and “signature songs,” The Hot Licks proved themselves a solid backing band. Dan’s sound relies partially on a call-and-response with two female backing singers (“The Lickettes”) but mostly on his all-acoustic rhythm section (“The Lickmen,” consisting of a second acoustic, a stand-up bass, a fiddle and mandolin), and their sound was crisp and clear, and their arrangements typically solid and imaginative, particularly on an instrumental jazz medley. This clean, inoffensive sound is part of Dan’s style for sure, and it’s a great context for his understated vocal approach. Played live, the music was smooth, old-timey, stoic and cool (as in Rat Pack cool), but those elements also tended to too-often deprive the songs of any urgency, sometimes sounding a little too practiced and hence ill-fit for Dan’s irreverence. The newer songs sounded fresher and seemed to engage Dan more noticeably, and some performances were heightened through the energy of the generally boisterous and affectionate audience — the best example being closer “Payday Blues.”

Again, the music is just the background to the main attraction. Dan Hicks, dressed to the nines, stepped out and made clear right away (“They tell me Dan is in the building”) that none of this was to be taken seriously. He plays the consummate showman, speaking to the “ladies and gentlemen” of the audience in between songs with a smooth, practiced air. His talent at that role is most effective because it’s making fun of itself. There is nothing new in a performer using a jokey repartee, but with Dan Hicks, everything is a joke. He announces a song is being played by request, and then proceeds to rattle off a long list of requesters that steadily devolve into preposterous titles. One of his songs was a “commercial for the new record,” the moral of it being that to get laid, a fella need do nothing more than “play Tangled Tales for your baby.” He played his well-known “I Scare Myself,” on record a beautifully haunting, honest statement of insecurity, fear, and love — a song Elvis Costello has called one of the best ever written, but he simultaneously made conscious efforts to rob it of any profundity, introducing it as a “powerful motherfucker” and goofing off with The Lickettes throughout the performance. It’d be nice to call his stage approach ironic, but it’s actually just old-fashioned sarcasm, directed at himself, at his audience, and at his music alike.

That’s why he’s so engaging. His personality doesn’t feel like a trick or a mask. He’s a weird guy who writes interesting songs played by talented musicians, and even in trying to undercut everything he does (he burped into the microphone while introducing his closing number), he only reaffirms that esoteric charisma that has kept Dan Hicks fresh and lively for over 30 years.