Allen to Bring ‘Men Are Pigs’ Gig to Irvine Improv

Men are pigs.

That’s the launching point for Tim Allen’s stand-up act. In Allen’s world, the men gather round to grunt approvingly at the new lawn mower on the block. They track grease through the house as a way of marking territory, and turn a visit to the tool department at Sears into some kind of religious/sexual pilgrimage.

If the household dusting were left to Allen, he would duct-tape all those annoying knickknacks down and fire up the leaf blower.

Allen’s fresh but decidedly middle-American slant on the old men-and-their-tools routine has, to his own surprise, earned him a loyal and growing following in trend-happy Southern California. He’ll be in Los Angeles tonight to tape a segment of the syndicated series “Comic Strip Live” before heading south for a sold-out Sunday night gig at the Irvine Improv.

“I would never have thought Southern California would have taken to me,” Allen said this week during a phone interview from his Detroit home. But when he appeared on a four-comic bill at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim last May, he got the biggest audience response--and when he returned to Orange County in July for an extended stand at the Laff Stop, fans greeted him with his own trademark “men are pigs” snort.

Allen gives a good part of the credit for his local success to the weekday radio feature “Five O’Clock Funnies” on KLOS-FM, which has featured him regularly. And he believes that Orange County’s suburban flavor--where “taking care of your house and going to the hardware store are very fulfilling”--may explain why he has been able to build the exposure into a following here.

No overnight success (he first took the stage as a comic in 1979), Allen has toured incessantly for five years, building other loyal pockets of fans throughout the Midwest and East. He even has a few devotees who follow him, Grateful Dead-style, from gig to gig.

While he describes himself up as a solidly Midwestern kind of guy, he does live in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park a few months out of the year, acting in commercials and attending auditions.

“I like it there,” Allen said. “It’s kind of a neighborhoody place. . . . There’s gutters to be cleaned. I could bring my parents there and they’d say, ‘This is Los Angeles?’ ”

He says his “hardware-storeish” material stems at least partly from his own interests--he’s a car fan who owns a vintage Mustang and a new Cadillac--and he finds particular inspiration on the streets of Los Angeles. “I almost break my neck looking at cars around there,” he said.

Still, the former hardware salesman berated all those new, warehouse-style discount hardware outlets, stating his preference for the small, neighborhood store near his home in Detroit where the owner “knows every goddamn screw in the place.”

After his very first night on stage as a comic, Allen broke a ceramic tile from the floor of the club; he now has it framed and mounted on his wall, with the date written in felt pen: “3/23/79.”

He claims he keeps it so that “when I go back to working in a hardware store, I can tell my granddaughter, ‘I used to be a comic.’ And she’ll say, ‘Oh, sure.’ ”

Tim Allen headlines at the Improvisation, 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine, Sunday at 8:30 p.m. Admission: $7. Information: (714) 854-5455.