O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : Gentle Jabs Pack an Effective Punch : Humor: Rita Rudner, who appeared at the Laff Stop Thursday, has a style that is forthright yet, at the same time, draws her audience in.

Rita Rudner doesn’t bite, she nibbles. She doesn’t strangle, she massages. Rudner tickles instead of scratches.

Well, sometimes she scratches. But she’s almost apologetic about it. Even when she wants to dig in, the plunge seems unthreatening, like someone trying to be tough while waving a rubber knife.

Like at the Laff Stop on Thursday night, when she started picking on a pretty blonde in the front row. The dark-haired, New York-experienced Rudner tried to get into it; she really wanted to capitalize on all that Orange County all-Americanism in the audience, but as soon as her teeth started to show, the politeness welled up. Oh, this girl isn’t so bad . . . .

See, Rudner has this style. With her fey persona, she’s a little like a hip, slightly touched relative who speaks up and keeps amazing the family with all the tilted things she says. They’re peculiar musings, often wistful, sometimes startling. But she doesn’t unnerve you. She draws you in.

You dig listening to her. Like when she worries about how hard it must be to skywrite in Japan. All those funny letters to deal with. Or why baking soda has so many uses. “It’s clearly a substance in need of some direction.” Or the effects vegetarianism had on her. “I kept leaning toward the sunlight.”

Her husband wanted her to buy a leather dress. “I never knew how uncomfortable cows can be. That ‘moo’ is a cry for help.” She heard a friend’s new baby bawling. “It was like a mating cry to a car alarm.” She wonders if she and her husband should have a baby--or get a dog. “Should we ruin our carpet, or ruin our lives?”

And her new house in Beverly Hills? Yipes! It’s not finished, and all the help has an attitude. The painter won’t spackle or tape, so when the exterminator comes over and asks what the job is, she tells him to kill the painter. But then what do you do about all the mice?

She goes to the hardware store to get poison, and the tamper-proof bottle has been tampered with. Should she buy it? Maybe someone has filled it with Tylenol. She dwells on the mice: “I could be curing their headaches.”

And how do you decorate the home? Living in hotels on the road has left her with some bad ideas: There are two double beds in the living room and she’s nailed down all the lamps. The household contraptions are baffling, especially the lawn sprinkler. How do you get it to work? “As close as I can figure, it’s triggered by rain.”

OK, that’s enough. It’s tempting to keep quoting her routine because it’s so good. Thursday’s one-night stand was typical of her ability to establish rapport, not always such an easy thing for a comedian. Too often, there’s a stridency, a demand in the jokes that separates us, but not with her.

She does without all those heavy-grade twitches and ticks and human drum rolls that so many use to cue their gags. Instead, Rudner utilizes dead-eye timing and a humanizing natural quality that communicates the heart of her work.

She can get a little cute--the vaguely surreal knock-off of a LaLa Land Gracie Allen gets too wide-eyed as she dawdles at the microphone--but even that only puts our attention on hold for a minute. Rudner has a way of getting us back--she just starts talking again.