Louie Anderson Will Perform at Benefit at UCI

Comedian Louie Anderson will headline the second annual All-Star Comedy Show on Saturday at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center.

The show, which also features Jerry Miner and Peter Gaulke, will benefit the Irvine-based Community Service Programs, a nonprofit human services agency serving Orange County with a variety of programs, including shelter for troubled and runaway youths, family crisis intervention and services for child-abuse victims.

For Anderson, who found an outlet in comedy for the anger and anxiety he felt growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father, it’s a subject that hits close to the bone.

“I guess my comedy was definitely my way out of the situation,” said Anderson, who used to joke about his father in his act. “In a lot of ways I built a career around the idea that I had an alcoholic father.”

Anderson said he “made the best possible situation I could out of the child abuse. But I’d rather trade a normal childhood for the comedy career. It would be nice to be able to enjoy life, and that’s what I’m learning to do now.”

Anderson, who wrote about his relationship with his late father in a 1989 autobiography titled “Dear Dad: Letters From an Adult Child,” said he agreed to do the Community Service Programs benefit for two reasons.

“One was that it was in Orange County,” he said. “I like hearing that stuff like (this benefit) is going on in Orange County because it seems to have a bad rap when it comes to its charity-mindedness. It’s perceived often as a rich and affluent place with few problems.”

Anderson also appreciates the variety of services offered by Community Service Programs for abused and troubled youths.

“It seems like if we don’t get these people straightened out--offering services and doing intervention--they will continue to be a problem in the system,” he said. “I’m worried about the drug problem mostly because it seems like it’s increasing, and I think it all stems from child abuse.”

As Anderson sees it, “If we don’t love and support a child growing up, they’re going to be a problem later on. They could be that mass murderer or the wife beater or the drug addict, and I think we have to take a hard look at how we treat children in this society.”

In his own case as one of 11 children, he said, “I was not so much physically abused--I wasn’t that I know of. But there are whole parts of my early childhood that I have no recollection of. . . . They say that’s a sign of a more traumatic abuse that you haven’t uncovered yet.

“My father was physically and mentally abusive to my brothers and sisters and certainly my mother. I recall the emotional and the mental abuse as basically destroying my childhood, and now just as a 38-year-old person I’m recovering from that. So it has long-term effects on people. And it doesn’t get easier. If you don’t deal with it, it gets worse.”

Just as he turned to comedy to deal with the emotional pain he carried with him, Anderson also turned to food. The comedian, who at his peak weighed 420 pounds, has lost 90 pounds over the past year. But that doesn’t mean he has cut out talking about food in his act.

“I talk about doughnuts, drugs, heaven and hell--those are my new main topics,” he said. “My act certainly parallels what’s going on in the world, and I also do a lot of stuff that is lighthearted and fun. I make my act fun. I don’t get bogged down in the issues.”

Take his “addiction” to doughnuts, for example.

“Most people are addicted to drugs,” he says. “They wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Where can I get some drugs?’

“I wake up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Isn’t there a Winchell’s on La Brea?’ ”

* Comedians Louie Anderson, Jerry Miner and Peter Gaulke will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Bren Events Center on the UC Irvine campus. A pre-event reception starts at 7. Tickets: $15 for general admission and $10 for UCI students. Information: (714) 250-0488.