COMEDY : Aleck Doesn’t Mind Getting Personal

Comedian Jimmy Aleck has been married two years now, but he still hasn’t quite gotten used to the idea of living with a woman.

“There are questions I want to ask my wife that I’m a little afraid to ask her,” he admits, running through a litany of husbandly complaints:

“Why can’t women learn to put the toilet seat back up?

“How does she know to stand in front of the TV set during the biggest play of the game?

“Why does she get three closets and I get the back of a chair?”

Aleck, who is headlining at the Irvine Improv through Sunday, has always focused a good part of his act on his personal life. And now that he’s married, his material on relationships between the sexes has taken a new twist. Notes Aleck: “The gift for your first anniversary is paper, so I gave my wife a map to the kitchen.”

“My wife didn’t think that was too funny,” Aleck conceded with a laugh during an interview last week. But while he teases women in his act, he said, “they know I’m on their side. I don’t do it maliciously.”

Indeed, the bespectacled Aleck comes across as the guy next door. His is a non-threatening comedy style best described as casual and relaxed, one that leaves his audiences feeling as though they are sitting in his living room.

“I take a rather easy-listening approach,” he said. “I kind of just sit on a stool and have a conversation with the audience rather than ‘performing’ for them, or performing jokes.”

That seems a likely approach for someone who started out as a radio disc jockey in Bloomington, Ind., in the early ‘70s while majoring in film and television at Indiana University. Recalls the Chicago-born comedian: “When I was on radio I was always told to speak as though you’re talking to one individual. I just carried that over in my stand-up.”

After college, he worked at Chicago’s WGN, where he served as an assistant director and wrote skits for a show called “Bozo’s Circus.” He then started writing material for other comedians. But when he became “kind of irritated that they were getting laughs off my jokes,” he took the plunge into stand-up himself.

The 11-year comedy veteran, who served a two-year stint with Second City in Chicago, appears regularly on talk shows hosted by his longtime pals from the early days: Jay Leno, David Letterman and Arsenio Hall. (Says Aleck: “They do take care of their own, the guys they like and hang out with.”)

Although Aleck’s act evolves as his personal life changes, he also touches on current events.

Regarding Japan’s “buying up of America,” he observes: “Do you get the feeling the Home Shopping Network in Japan is a map of the United States?”

And he’s “amazed that our rock stars are getting older because we never had old rock stars before. Like Peter Townshend of the Who is hard of hearing. As a matter of fact, the Who’s thinking of changing their name to ‘Huh? ‘ “

But these days married life is never far from his thoughts.

Why is it, he wonders, that every time a man looks at another woman his wife catches him?

“You know your wife looks at other men, but you just can’t catch her,” says Aleck, who thinks he has it figured out: “Women have the ability to glance at a man and store the information for later.”

Who: Jimmy Aleck.

When: Thursday, Sept. 26, and Sunday, Sept. 29, at 8:30 p.m.; Friday, Sept. 27, at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 28, 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.