COMEDY REVIEW : Contemporary Storyteller With Bulging Talent

What if, by some quirk of time and technology, a guy was sequestered in a small room for an extended round-table discussion with comedians Buddy Hackett, Gilbert Gottfried, the Three Stooges’ Curly Howard, plus Daffy Duck?

The guy would probably have a delivery exactly like that of comedian Dennis Wolfberg, who opened a six-night stand Tuesday at the Improvisation Comedy Club in Irvine.

Now, that delivery takes some getting used to. But if you would expect the guy who emerged from that room to not only say things funny, but say funny things, Wolfberg again fits that description.

A curly-haired gent with a propensity for wildly bugging his eyes (maybe Marty Feldman also dropped in on that meeting), Wolfberg has other characteristics that distinguish him from the current crop of stand-up practitioners.

He is far more anecdotal than observational, operating more in the style of old-school comics while addressing wholly contemporary issues. (Though a few of his subjects were a bit tired.)

And rather than hopping from topic to topic, he prefers to spin long tales, riffing (or improvising) off a central theme--not unlike a jazz musician--which yielded huge, intense waves of laughter versus a steady stream of audience response.

He opened Tuesday with probably his shortest segment, immediately discussing those bulging peepers (“Some people have bedroom eyes--I have headlight eyes”), before moving on to longer pieces.

The first was a story about performing at an old-age home in Columbia, S.C., where a woman was celebrating her 102nd birthday--”a woman,” he added, “who did not look good for 102.”

After his performance, a birthday cake was brought out for the woman, “but in a stroke of remarkable misjudgment, they gave her those candles that you cannot blow out.” He went on to report that throughout his visit, the woman didn’t laugh at anything, even when he joked “102--I’ll bet there’s no peer pressure.”

Between such yarns, Wolfberg occasionally opened dialogue with members of the crowd. He repeatedly chatted with a German woman, despite a slight communication problem that telegraphed itself when Wolfberg had trouble grasping the woman’s name: “There’s no way I could pronounce that without doing severe intestinal damage.”

In one of their later conversations, Wolfberg was intrigued that the woman--whose command of English was obviously shaky--would come to a comedy club. Specifically, he wondered whether his jokes were going over with her. She paused, then replied, “Well, German humor is different.”

Without missing even half a beat, he said: “As a Jew, I’ve heard.”

For the most part, though, he stayed with the prepared anecdotes on his misadventures as a single man until his fairly recent marriage, various subjects tied to the birth of his baby boy, his poor academic performance when he was a premed student, his 12 years of tribulations as a teacher in the South Bronx and the details of a very thorough physical exam.

Because most of these were long, carefully crafted, well-developed pieces, it is difficult to pull representative jokes out of context. But in the child-birth section, he revealed that when his wife was pregnant, she said: “She couldn’t feel the baby kick, but she could feel its eyes bulge. (So I’m) reasonably sure it’s mine .”

Headlining a strong bill that includes Rob Schneider (it’s rare that a middle act has a “Letterman” credit, but Schneider does) and Steve Carey, Wolfberg continues at the Irvine Improv through Sunday.

The Improvisation Comedy Club is at 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine. Show times: 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. Friday, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $6-$10. Information: (714) 854-5455.