Rocky LaPorte: Know What He’s Sayin’? : Comedy: The former truck driver will bring his streetwise, blue-collar humor to an Orange Coast College show tonight.

Yo! So how’s Brooklyn-born Rocky LaPorte--he of the dese, dem and dose delivery--doin’ down in Texas, performing at a club in Dallas?

“Down here they sometimes giggle before I even get to the jokes,” he answered by phone last week in an accent as thick as mozzarella. “I start slammin’ them about the way they talk and they’re like, ‘Who’s this guy to talk?’

“I’m an alien to these guys,” said LaPorte, who headlines a show tonight at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. “I’m like E.T. coming down here: ‘E.T. Goes to Texas.’ I ask them about sneaking people into the drive-in theater by putting them in the trunk: ‘Do you guys do that out here? That’d be pretty hard to do in a pickup truck. . . . Eight guys lying in back of a pickup truck: ‘It didn’t work, Bubba.’ ”

But wherever he is, audiences seem to relate to his blue-collar comedy. A self-described “regular Joe,” he comes across like a guy who stopped off for a few brewskies after work and then, on a dare from his buddies, got up on stage.

“Actually, I do great in blue-collar cities,” LaPorte said. “I really know where they’re comin’ from. I drove a truck and worked on the dock for 10 years. I was like the Bruce Springsteen of comedy for a while, but I don’t have the money he does.”

LaPorte isn’t joking about driving a truck: Until three years ago, he was driving an 18-wheeler in Chicago. But after six months of successful open-mike nights, he quit his job to do comedy full time.

“For two years,” he recalled, “I played all the hell gigs you can do--bowling alleys and bars--and had people throw stuff at me.” But he also won the top ($10,000) prize in the 1990 Johnny Walker National Comedy Search, which involved more than 1,600 contestants in 20 cities; he appeared on “The Pat Sajak Show” and “An Evening at the Improv,” and on Saturday he’ll tape his fourth appearance on “Comic Strip Live.”

Hollywood also has discovered the streetwise, endearing comic. He made a recent guest appearance on “Cheers” (playing a construction worker: “There’s a big stretch for me”) and he just completed a sitcom pilot directed by William Asher, the creator of “Bewitched,” in which he plays an exterminator (“another big stretch”).

“They’re pitching it to a few networks as we speak,” LaPorte said.

But the comedian doesn’t plan to go Hollywood.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m not slammin’ Hollywood. But it’s not for me. I like hanging around the corners with my buddies, you know what I’m saying?”

Though he’s on the road about 40 weeks a year, Chicago is home to LaPorte, who is married with four children, three girls (“I call them the Rockettes”) and a 5-month-old son (“I named him Rocky; I thought of that myself. “)

He recently moved his family out of the city into a Chicago suburb.

“The neighborhood I was in was getting kind of rough,” he explained. “There was lots of gangs and shootings.”

Indeed. LaPorte, whose truck route took him right through Chicago’s mean streets, may be the only stand-up comedian who has been shot three times and stabbed twice. He also had a fledgling career as a professional boxer, but, he said, “that ended when I got shot the last time, in 1985. . . . Yeah, I got this wacky thing about attracting lead, you know what I’m saying?’

With comedy, LaPorte is doing what comes naturally.

“I always made people at work laugh,” he said. “The weird thing is, before I was a comic, when something funny came to me, I’d pull my 18-wheeler to the side of road and write it down. I had no idea for what. But these things would strike me as funny and I’d write them down.”

He said he tries to write new material for his act every day.

“To me, that’s the biggest thrill in the whole world: to write something that day and take it on stage and it works.”

Jeans and a T-shirt are his usual onstage garb.

“Sometimes I get dressed up and throw a jersey on,” he said.

“People always come up and say I’m like their garbage man, or (they say), ‘My old man worked in a sewer with a guy like you.’ It’s never, like, a doctor or lawyer, you know what I’m saying?”

Yeah, and here’s some other stuff LaPorte is saying:

About a trip he took to the beach: “You should see the size of the sea gulls. They’re huge. They look like pigs with wings. I seen one take a dump on a guy’s head. It gave him a concussion. . . . And not only are they big, they got attitudes, too. There was one of them--he was like sitting on the hood of my car. I went over to him. I said, “Hey! Get off!’ And he goes, ‘Are you talkin’ to me?’ ”

* About his literary career: “I wrote an etiquette book. . . . I did. The name of the book was ‘Hey, Cut It Out!’ I’m writin’ a sequel to it. It’s called, ‘Smatta, You Deaf?’ ”

* About his mother: “She’s always complaining, you know? Like last time I’m over, she’s goin’, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing dishes on Mother’s Day.’ I said, ‘I know, especially since you got all that laundry piled up over there.’ ”

Rocky LaPorte, Matt Weinhold and Todd Glass perform tonight in the Robert Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Show time: 8 p.m. General admission: $12.50 in advance, $15 at the door. Information: (714) 432-5880.