Chuck Martin Rides New O.C. Comedy Wave

OK, let’s face it: While a number of prominent comedians have performed locally, Orange County isn’t exactly thought of as a major spawning ground for comedic talent. On that front, the county’s one big claim to fame is Steve Martin, who as a local lad developed his performing skills at Disneyland.

In recent years, though, some aspiring comics who grew up or moved here have been joining the ranks of key players on the national stand-up scene. We’ve chronicled the rise of Jerry Miner from doorman at the Laff Stop to his current position headlining clubs across the country and writing jokes for Jay Leno.

Similarly, attorney-turned-comic Al Lubel developed his craft on local stages and went on to become the 1988 “Star Search” $100,000 comedy champion. Several local funny folks are following similar paths--continually writing jokes and securing stage time wherever possible in an ongoing quest for improvement, with an eye toward scoring a major breakthrough: an appearance on “Letterman,” a role in a TV show or film, a plum writing job, whatever.

Chuck Martin, Jim Hope, and Tom Martin are not only steadfastly engaged in this battle but seem to be winning it. The connection for this local trio isn’t just that they are local, or that they work extremely hard, but that their efforts have yielded remarkable--and remarkably quick--improvement. (It’s worth noting that two of them began their careers as members of the UCI Comedy Club, a campus organization in which students learn to write and perform stand-up.)

In this three-part series, we will meet Hope and the unrelated Martins, find out about their first forays into being funny, and look at the ways each has come unusually far, unusually fast.

Of this troika of funny guys, Chuck Martin is the furthest along--and yet the youngest: 24. Not coincidentally, he’s the only one who grew up wanting to be a comedian.

“It’s something I always wanted to do,” says

Martin, who will be playing this weekend at Jokers, a new club in Garden Grove. “I started watching ‘The Tonight Show’ in the fifth grade. I would stay up every night, and if there was a comedian on I would watch the whole thing ‘cause they were usually on last. But if there was an opera singer or whatever, I’d go to bed.

“But I would always watch the comics. And it amazed me then how it seemed like everything they said was funny. When you watch it, you have no idea how hard that is and how many times they’ve said those things. But it just seemed to me, ‘God, how do they do that?’ ”

This early interest notwithstanding, he didn’t step on stage for the first time until he was 21, when he was attending Arizona State and decided to try an open-mike night at a nearby comedy club called Finney Bones.

Martin waited that long partly because “you had to be 21 in Arizona to get into the bars” but also because “I wanted to be professional about it right from the beginning.”

A noble ambition, but before that first show, he made one of those classic miscalculations endemic to novice comics: In a discussion with the club operator about how long his performance would be, Martin felt like he could do 15 minutes easy, figuring his written material amounted to about an hour’s worth. Nonetheless, he was asked to perform a five-minute set. “I did every one of the jokes, and it came out to about three minutes.”

Nevertheless, a mere three months after that first open-mike night, Finney Bones booked him for a week, leapfrogging Martin over other local comics who had been pursuing stand-up a year (or years ) longer.

It wasn’t the last time his local peers were flabbergasted (read: irritated) at his precocious breakthroughs and gumption. When the Last Laugh comedy chain opened a new club in Phoenix, Martin immediately auditioned and got hired for a week there, which led to his first road booking at the chain’s San Jose venue. This triggered some baffled, if not green-eyed, response. “The other guys,” Martin remembers, “were going ‘Gee, how did you do that? ‘ “

Martin allows that from day one he was pretty confident. Initially, he now admits, “it was just stupid confident. Still, I realized right away, and this might be one of the keys, that every time I went on stage I had to learn something about performing or about the jokes. I would always be thinking about it, where a lot of guys there were just playing around. They weren’t working. . . . Your act is the important thing, not what happens that night.”

In the year since he moved to Costa Mesa, he has locked firmly into his character, his persona--itself a notable achievement for someone who has been performing for such a short time. Dark-haired and bespectacled, Martin looks rather bookish. OK, nerdish . He doesn’t necessarily come off like a nerd--his material is too bright and aware for that--but many sections of his act play off that appearance. One of his best lines involves the reaction he typically gets from women when he enters a health club: “What’s he doing here? Maybe they’re getting audited.”

Martin is a strong middle act everywhere--including the prestigious, highly discriminating Improv circuit. He plans to work the road about 40 weeks in the next year and hopes to add more TV credits to his current list: “Evening at the Improv,” “Showtime Comedy Club Network” and “Comedy Express.”

He will be on the bill for the grand opening this weekend of Orange County’s newest comedy club, Jokers at the Hyatt Regency Alicante in Garden Grove. He’s at the Irvine Improv periodically, doing a “guest set” or just watching; his next scheduled appearance there is New Year’s Eve week.

That’s a prized booking, indication of how highly he’s regarded there, and that his dramatic improvement hardly has gone unnoticed. “He’s so good now,” said Irvine Improv manager Pam Felix. “He’s really, really polished--up there with any of our middles.” When you consider that most Improv middles have been performing many years longer than Martin, and some boast “Tonight Show” or “Letterman” credits, that’s high praise indeed.

Chuck Martin performs on a bill with Dave Coulier and Andy Wayne Friday and Saturday at 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. at Jokers/Hyatt Regency Alicante, 100 Plaza Alicante, Garden Grove. Admission: $15. Information: (714) 971-3000.