Jim Hope’s Interest in Comedy Was Strictly Academic Until Sophomore Year at UCI

Jim Hope shares a key trait with many of stand-up’s new generation: He didn’t grow up with a burning desire to be a comic. “I never thought I’d be a comedian,” the 25-year-old says. “I thought I was going to be a college professor.” But two things happened--both, ironically, in a college setting--that changed his outlook.

When he was a sophomore at UC Irvine, he caught an on-campus performance by Bob Saget, a veteran comedian who now stars in the hit ABC sitcom “Full House.” Saget’s show left a powerful impression--in part, Hope now acknowledges, because Hope knew so little then about the art of stand-up.

“I didn’t realize,” Hope recalls, “he did this every night, that he wasn’t just making it up. I didn’t know that when I watched it, and I thought ‘This guy is just a genius.’ ”

That fascination lingered as Hope became a senior and helped lure him into the newly formed UCI Comedy Club, launched by adviser Jim BirgeQ, who had started a similar group at UCLA.

After Hope’s first show with the UCI group in May of 1986, the bug had definitely bitten--hard. “Once I did a show, it was over for me--it was ‘ This is what I’m going to do.’ ”

He wasn’t joking. Hope, who still lives in Irvine, pursued his comedy career with a single-minded fervor and made enormous strides. A physical comedian who favors exaggeration and absurdism, he already has moved up to middle-act status locally and at many clubs around the country.

This rapid rise appears to have resulted from well-focused toiling and an initiallybrazen attitude that actually had more to do with ignorance than arrogance. For example, less than a year after that first UCI show he went up to the Hollywood Improvisation and showcased for Improv impresario Budd Friedman, a move many comics don’t make for years.

“I figured I’d just go up on stage, Budd Friedman would see me and he’d say, ‘He’s good--we want him,’ ” Hope explains, laughing now at his naivete then. “I figured that was the natural progression: They’d make me a regular there, then I’d work everywhere, and in six months, I’d be making a good living at this.

“I was just overconfident . . . I just thought there was no way that I couldn’t succeed--it’s easy. Now I realize how difficult it really is.”

While the audition didn’t exactly turn out the way he pictured it (“well, no one came up to me and said ‘the kid’s good’ . . .”), that babe-in-the-wood outlook ended up more a plus than a minus: it helped keep him from being intimidated by how difficult it really is. He simply forged ahead.

That--along with a “strong ethic” (which he says he learned in the UCI Comedy Club) toward writing original material, versus the “borrowing” common to neophyte comics--hastened his arrival as a sharp, promising comedian. In addition to his increasing number of road engagements, he often appears locally, where stops include the Irvine Improv (his next weeklong stint there begins Oct. 30).

Another local stomping ground is the Laff Stop, where he often goes on Monday nights to try out new material and which gave him essential stage time early on. Laff Stop manager Janis TaylorC has watched Hope’s evolution. “The thing that’s always impressed me about Jim is that he is constantly writing, and he is not afraid to go on stage and try anything ,” she says. “I’ve always felt that he is a courageous performer . . . I think he will be a comic who is constantly evolving.”

Birge of the UCI Comedy Club saw the earliest stages of that evolution--back when Hope had what Birge calls “an obsession with Bob Saget”-- and he charts Hope’s progress in that context.

“Jim’s comedy style sort of mimicked Saget’s to some extent, but I saw Jim grow so much beyond that,” Birge says. “In fact, as much as he seemed to idolize Bob Saget, I think if Bob were to see Jim now, he would be very, very impressed.”