‘NERD’ HAS THE LAST LAUGH AS COMEDY CAREER GROWS

Even at the age of 36, Steve Gates is a real nerd.

He wears his pants too high. His glasses are round and thick, like saucers. He whines.

He bears a strong resemblance to the 99-pound weakling in the old Charles Atlas comic book ads--you know, the guy who keeps getting sand kicked in his face by some brute.

But as nerds go, Gates is definitely lovable. And when he appears at clubs like the Improv in Pacific Beach or Rockwell’s in Carlsbad, his tragicomic tales of life in the slow lane are met with uproarious laughter that always appears more sympathetic than demeaning.

“When I was a kid, I went to Catholic school,” Gates told a recent Improv crowd. “And the thing about confession is that once a week, you have to tell a stranger everything you’ve ever done wrong.

“Kids never remember numbers, so you make numbers up when you’re in there--whatever’s close. Like, ‘Oh, I lied to my parents 12 times, and I took money out of my mom’s purse twice--OK, three times, OK--and I had impure thoughts and actions with myself, oh, three, four thousand times.’

“Which is true. Because when I hit puberty, it was all over.”

Even before the laughter dies down, Gates abruptly changes the subject.

“One thing that always gets me while driving is, who are these geeks who put that frame around their license plate that says, ‘So many women, so little time’?” Gates whined. “Who do these guys think they are?

“I mean, you know they’re losers. You know they work at Jack-in-the-Box and they’ve got acne permanently, and you just want to pull them over and slap them. What audacity these guys have got!”

The room is quiet. After pausing a second to shake his head, Gates deadpanned: “I took mine off two weeks ago.”

Gates firmly believes that comedy and tragedy are intertwined.

“Comedy is tragedy,” he said. “You laugh at handicapped people not because you want to but because--let’s face it--they’re funny to look at.

“People have to laugh to overcome sadness, to deal with tragedy. If you can’t laugh at yourself and at the world around you, you’re dead meat.

“And if it wasn’t for comedy, I probably would be.”

Accordingly, Gates--a native of Toledo, Ohio, who came to San Diego with the Navy in 1972 and never left--said he broke into comedy six years ago “at the absolute lowest point in my life.”

“My wife left me for my best friend, I lost my house, and my business went bankrupt--all in a period of about 60 days,” Gates recalled. “So I decided to become a comedian. There was nothing left for me to do.

“I started to talk about all the things that had gone wrong with my life and soon found that at the very least, they were worth a laugh.

“And even today, everything I talk about has happened to me in one form or another. I might stretch things a little bit, but 99% of the things I say on stage are true.”

Unlike the half-dozen other local comics with any kind of a draw, Gates said, he almost never goes out on the road.

“I still work a day job as a tool-and-die maker,” he said, “because I have a family to support--I got married again a year and a half ago, and now we have a 6-month-old child.

“All the other comedians are single, and they can afford to devote all their time to comedy and touring--something I’m just not able to do.”

That’s not to say he regards comedy as a mere hobby, however. He’s in demand on the local nightclub scene. And for the last two years, Gates has been sending out demonstration tapes of his stuff to film producers and advertising agencies around the country.

So far, his efforts have landed him a number of bit parts in nationally distributed movies, including last year’s “Inside Adam Swit,” in which he played a harried clerk in a camera store.

And since 1984, Gates has been featured in nine television commercials for the Public Insurance Co., a statewide agency “that promises to insure you even if nobody else will,” he said.

His role? What else--a nerd.

“In all comedy, there’s always some downtrodden little pipsqueak who’s a perpetual loser,” Gates said. “It’s like you throw a black monkey in with a bunch of white monkeys, and what do they do? They kill it.

“Even in high school, I was that black monkey--I got pushed around all the time by everyone. But somehow, the audience is always hoping that sooner or later, the black monkey wins.

“And through comedy, through picking myself up and laughing at everything that’s gone wrong in my life, I finally am winning.”