COMEDY REVIEW : Hazell’s Nice-Guy Look at Growing Up

Pat Hazell may do a little juggling here, some meager sleight-of-hand there, but his touchstone is the whimsical territory of stand-up comedy, often the gauzy region of being young and growing up.

Hazell started roughly at the Improv on Tuesday (he headlines through Sunday), but that could have been because Henry Cho, the comic who preceded him, turned in such a solid set. Cho’s sly work raised the ante, and Hazell may have felt the pressure.

Whatever the reason, Hazell didn’t register much in the opening minutes. His less-assertive, nice-guy delivery suffered in contrast to Cho’s smooth but aggressive style. The change in tempo seemed to throw him and the audience off.

Then he began to massage his low-key recollections and concepts. Not all prospered, but the ones that did carried a degree of surprise mixed with a cozy, almost companionable quality.

Unlike some comedians who get results by pushing and daring us to participate, Hazell’s approach is generally non-threatening, although he can get a little snippy in the give-and-take ad-libs with the folks in the front rows. Most of the time, he creates impressions that are purposely fuzzy and tied to memory, like when he recalled boyhood’s favorite all-purpose toy, the green plastic soldier.

Standing rigid and reverential, Hazell even acted out the poses (“This is the bayonet guy and this is the bazooka guy “), getting them just right, even the prone, rifle-extended “sniper guy.” Hazell enjoyed his reverie so much, he shared a shameful secret. At Christmas, did anybody ever feel compelled, like he did, to “use your soldiers to attack the Nativity scene?”

Then there were his Jerry Seinfeld-esque mental snapshots of Halloween and the people who “gypped” you by handing out crummy stuff. After growing up, he made the mistake of giving out those miniboxes of raisins. The kids, of course, got even later, but he got even, too, by handing out ice cubes the next time when they weren’t looking.

Continuing in the adult mode, Hazell, like many comics, found himself lingering in the supermarket (at least he didn’t resort to any airplane gags). But while the material of others is often derivative, Hazell’s was fairly fresh, especially a bit on that long hunk of plastic we use to separate our items at the checkout line.

He did a clever pantomime of a guy who doesn’t know how to respond after his chips fall over into the groceries of the woman in front of him. And then, after lifting the separator ceremoniously over his head, Hazell suggested that its omnipresent power would be best served in international border disputes--see, all you have to do is surround a country with a bunch of them. . . .

In his earlier set, Cho used himself as the best example of how stereotyping is fraught with misperceptions. A Korean-American who was raised in Knoxville, Tenn., Cho came on strong with his heavy Southern accent, asking the crowd if there was anything “wrong with this picture.”

There wasn’t a whole lot wrong with his routine, as he went on to gab about good ol’ boys, shopping with girlfriends, driving and a misspent youth filled with events like “cow tipping.”

Pat Hazell and Henry Cho appear today at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m., Saturday at 8 and 10:30 p.m. and Sunday at 8:30 p.m. at the Improv, 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $7 and $10. Information: (714) 854-5455.