JITTER BUG : Despite the Nerves, It’s Been a Killer Year for Mark Schiff--Thanks to Uncle Miltie

Comedian Mark Schiff, who describes himself as a nervous performer anyway, was especially jittery waiting to go on stage at the Just for Laughs International Comedy Festival in Montreal last month.

But veteran performer Milton Berle, on hand to be inducted into the newly formed Comedy Hall of Fame, took the younger comic aside for a pep talk.

“Milton was very helpful to me,” said Schiff in a phone interview from Boston last week. “I was very nervous because we were doing live television and Milton, that’s all he used to do. He was able to calm me down. He sat with me for 20 minutes and told me not to worry, just relax. ‘Go out and kill them.’ ”

So he did.

“It was really one of those sets made in heaven,” he said.

Indeed, a handful of other comics on the bill were later cut from the edited version of the show that was repeated several times on Showtime. Schiff’s performance not only was left intact, but his was the only segment that Showtime has submitted for an ACE Award. And, said Schiff, “I was highlighted on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and CNN--without having to murder anybody.”

When Schiff got off stage in Montreal, Berle summoned him to his dressing room, where he told Schiff how much he had liked his set. Says Schiff: “He’s really a comic soul, and to hear it from a guy like him is enormous. “

It’s been that kind of year for Schiff, who is headlining at the Irvine Improv through Sunday.

Still basking in the glow of his success in Montreal, the comic who has appeared four times on both “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman” will star in his first solo special, “My Crummy Childhood,” which premieres Sept 6. on Showtime.

His Irvine audiences will get a glimpse at some of the material Schiff does in the special, in which he holds forth in the middle of a stage replica of his boyhood bedroom in the Bronx.

“I think that a lot of kids at certain times of their life think they had a crummy childhood, especially when they’re in it,” said Schiff, 36. “I’ve always done (material on) childhood and parents--stuff like that. It’s just something that has been primary to me.”

Schiff has never had to look far for material.

“If you look at the stuff I do, it’s pretty much right out of my life,” he said. “Somehow I’ve trained my eye to spot things that I think are funny. I don’t do parodies on TV comics, television or movies.”

He does do material on shopping at the supermarket, a signature routine that he did in Montreal and which he repeats on his special:

“I can never find people who work in these stores,” he observes in his act. “I was in the meat department. I saw a guy in a white coat--blood all over the thing. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He goes, ‘I don’t work here.’ ”

The majority of the 30-minute special, however, is devoted to his “crummy” childhood.

He talks about how his father refused his request to raise his 50-cent allowance to $1 by saying, “We can’t afford it.” Then, after young Schiff gets the raise, his mother tells him to get his allowance out of her purse: “I opened it up and she had like $300! I’m thinking, ‘These people have been ripping me off!’ ”

He also does a bit about sitting in the back seat on family car trips and being warned by his parents not to play with the locks on the doors because, “God forbid you fall out.”

“The sickest thing I ever did, my folks were going 70 on the freeway, I opened the back door and hid behind the seat. . . . Their hair went up in the air. My father’s going, ‘He fell out!’ “

Schiff makes effective use of his mobile, Silly Putty face throughout his act as he does impressions of his mom and dad.

There’s his father, who prompts Schiff to wonder: “How do you take orders from a guy in his boxer shorts? There’s no authority . . . with the belly, with the knees.”

And why, Schiff asks, “Do fathers always have to scratch their (behind) when they’re thinking?”

Here he is as his mother confronting him as a teen-ager at 4 o’clock in the morning after being told to be home at 10:30:

“Now you listen to me . . . I AM YOUR MOTHER, don’t mimic me. . . . Say that again . . . What did you say? You what? That I should go to sleep? I HAVEN’T SLEPT SINCE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN. . . . I have had it. I’ve had it with with you and your father . . . and when he gets home I’ll tell him. “

Who: Mark Schiff.

When: Thursday, Aug. 22, and Sunday, Aug. 25, at 8:30 p.m.; Friday, Aug. 23, at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 24, at 8 and 10:30 p.m.

Where: The Improv, 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: In the Irvine Marketplace shopping center, across Campus Drive from UC Irvine.

Wherewithal: $7 to $10.

Where to call: (714) 854-5455.