Livingston Taylor brings just about everything to the concert stage.

He’s uproariously funny.

He’s a virtuoso (and teaches at the Berklee College of Music).

Genetics – “Who?,” an audience member shouted when he mentioned his brother, James – are on his side and the family resemblance is there in stage presence, guitar tunings, attitude and voice.

And Taylor, Livingston, that is, is as well-rounded an entertainer as anyone could ever hope to see, even if his relative obscurity meant only some 80 people turned out to see him put on an outrageously entertaining Friday-nightperformance inside Newark’s Thirty One West.

Without being sappy about it, he acknowledged the Dec. 6 date by mixing two holiday originals, “Christmas is Almost Here,” on guitar and “My Perfect Christmas Day,” on piano, into a set that found him offering up non-seasonal compositions and covering a wide swath of musical history with songs by Laura Nyro (“Sweet Blindness”), Jerome Kern (“Pick Yourself Up”), Kenny Chesney (“The Good Stuff”), Rodgers and Hammerstein (“Getting to Know You”) and some dude he had talked to the night before with a little number known as “Carolina in My Mind.”

Dressed in khaki pants, a blue dress shirt and a bow tie that was loosened about a third of the way through the 95-minute set, Taylor epitomized the nutty professor, both incredibly serious and not at all serious. When his students get tired of playing the same chords, he said, he recommends they smoke marijuana until mediocrity becomes a viable option; when “F” chords become painful to play – they’re always painful to play – he suggests switching to the key of “G,” which is good for a week and a half; and though he’s a pilot and a proud North Carolinian, he thinks it’s “bullshit” his home state proclaims itself “first in flight” and sung his song “Kitty Hawk” to help make his point.

When he wasn’t playing guitar or piano and accompanying himself with a loud, stomping foot, Taylor was giving professorial dissertations and dissecting the lyrics to numbers like “It’s My Party” and “My Boyfriend’s Back” to prove the power in seemingly simplistic songs that he cast as engrossing conversations disguised as pop songs. These asides were slide splitting, as Taylor punctuated his insights with body language and exaggerated facial expressions.

Funnier still were tunes about living dangerously (“I’m Not as Herbal as I Ought to Be”), a dollar bill’s journey through the straight and illicit economies creatively titled “The Dollar Bill Song” and a number about the struggle between a song’s protagonist and its author in the form of Andy Breckman’s “Railroad Bill,” who would rather save a damsel on the tracks than a cat in a tree.

“I said, ‘maybe there’ll be room in the eighth or ninth verse, but right now I want you up in that tree/I’m the writer, goddam, I got the pen in my hand and you’re supposed to listen to me’/he said, ‘you asshole, why should I listen to you, you should be listening to me instead/I’m a railroad man and if I was real, I’d separate your face from your head.’”

When the end of the program rolled around – far too soon – Taylor invited his former student, and opening act, Rebecca Loebe to join him for a lovely duet on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Taylor sat at the piano bench fingerpicking his acoustic guitar while Loebe delivered the lyrics with just the right combination of power and emotion. They then closed the show with a medley of “The Merry Old Land of Oz” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that, instead of being cheesy, which could have happened, were utterly delightful – a reminder that life is precious, holding on to a scrap of childhood is essential and music is an elixir.