COMEDY REVIEW : McTigue’s Gamble Pays Off--for Audience : * He risks losing the crowd with his teasing, stop-and-start rhythm, but he manages to pull it back in with deft skill. He’s at the Brea Improv through Sunday.

Tom McTigue might consider changing his name to Tom McTease.

The Seattle-based comic enjoys making his audiences squirm, and he’s the first to admit it. For a minute or two after taking the stage at the Improv on Tuesday night, McTigue paced the stage, grinning and sipping his drink and not saying much of anything.

“I’ve got you worried, haven’t I?” he finally asked. “A lot of comics will come out and endear themselves to you right away. I prefer to make you wonder if you wasted your money.”

While most comics strive to hit a groove and stay with it, McTigue works in a stop-and-start rhythm that can take him from zero to 60--and back again--in nothing flat. It’s something of a gamble, as he risks losing his audience at several points in his set. But then he pulls them back in with deft skill.

“This seems like an ideal time to have more material,” he remarked during one particularly long dead spot about halfway through his set. But he was just having a bit of fun--there was plenty of material left, of course, some of his best. McTigue just seems to take a perverse pleasure in keeping the audience off-balance with wide-eyed, nervous pauses.

McTigue’s domain is familiar observational turf, but he manages to find some untrodden corners. He’ll start with a rather mundane topic--burning his mouth on a hot chicken pot pie, for instance--and use it to launch into countless absurdist digressions into such seemingly unrelated topics as strange dreams, cat vomit, the Gulf War and the inordinately large amount of his memory space taken up by old “Brady Bunch” episodes.

He manages to make it all seem extemporaneous, when actually it’s the product of intricate comic writing, highlighted by McTigue’s offbeat timing, superior mimicry skills and a world view that’s genuinely goofy, in the best sense of the word.

A bit that started off with what must be the only comic routine on sponge-fishing (“You’ve got to get up early in the morning to fool a sponge”) digressed into some hilarious observations on evolution. Somehow, he got on the subject of flounders, and how that one eye had to migrate, over eons, from one side of the bottom-dwelling fish’s head to the other.

“For millions of years, they swam around going, ‘Damn, got sand in my eye,’ ” McTigue said. Then he imagined the relief for the first flounder with both eyes on the same side of its head: “Hey, this is better.”

That segued into a bit on swimming at the beach, and how sand manages to find its way into nooks and crannies McTigue said he didn’t even know he had. A familiar observation, but the comic managed to find a fresh twist.

“Instead of rinsing it off,” he declared, “I’m going to leave it there and make pearls.”

But then, that’s McTigue’s specialty--finding pearls, comic and otherwise, in the unlikeliest places.

* Comedian Tom McTigue continue s through Sunday at the Brea Improv, 945 E. Birch St., Brea. Admission: $7. Information: (714) 529-7878.