Giving Comedy the Old College Try : Performance: Six members of club at UC Irvine get the chance to show off stand-up skills in quarterly showcase.

Payam Eshraghian wants to know what happened to spring break in Palm Springs.

A few years back, he said, there were “3,000 girls” there during the annual party-time college vacation. “Now,” he lamented, “it’s me and 5,000 GIs.”

Dave Hurwitz, meanwhile, is curious about some of the college clubs he sees advertised on campus at UC Irvine, like the Commuter Student Assn.: “That’s kind of a loose basis for forming a club, isn’t it?” he asked. “I drive to school and I want to be with others of my kind.”

Such college humor was sprinkled throughout Wednesday night’s quarterly showcase for members of the UCI Comedy Club, though it was by no means the only subject area.

Ghizal Hasan wondered about all the fuss over videophones. “What’s the big deal? The Jetsons had them years ago.”

Phil Fleischmann, in a twist on the smoker’s standard rationalization about that habit, said he is not the least bit uncomfortable about being a nonsmoker: “Hey, I can start anytime I want to.”

Since it was formed in 1985, the UCI Comedy Club has helped spawn some comics who have gone on to professional careers--Tom Martin and Jim Hope both are busy on the club circuit, and Martin also writes for television. All six current members of the club--including UCI students as well as some graduates--were on the bill Wednesday at the university’s Crystal Cove Auditorium.

In addition to Eshraghian, Hurwitz, Hasan and Fleischmann, the performance featured club members Mark Sinclair and Michael Ho. Tom Ramsey was the guest headliner.

The delivery was shaky at times, and some of the jokes went flat. Hasan was actually distracted by laughter at one slow point in his set: “Something’s funny over there, and I want to know what it is, because I know it’s not me.”

Mark Weatherford, a member who attended the showcase although he has stopped doing stand-up to concentrate on screenwriting, allowed that club members have some room for improvement in their stagecraft. “Most of the club’s focus is on good writing. The writing quality is high,” he said. It’s harder to work on delivery because stage time is hard to come by.

A club credo, Weatherford said, is to steer clear of “hack” comedy--Asian drivers, gay-bashing, cheap sight gags. Role models cited include Dana Gould, Steven Wright, Dennis Miller and George Carlin.

The club’s weekly meetings primarily are writing workshops, said Ho, where members test ideas and jokes on each other. Hurwitz, the group’s president, said the club is in “a bit of a lull right now” with just six active members, but it has had as many as 20 in the past.

Several club members also take part in Hasan’s weekly radio show on campus station KUCI-FM (88.9), which features original sketch comedy ranging from movie spoofs (“The Origami Kid,” “Silence of the Clams”) to a bit about competing taxidermy businesses.

Members come from a variety of backgrounds and majors. “Almost all the members have never done stand-up before,” said Ho, a ’91 engineering graduate who stays active in the group and who acted as emcee Wednesday. Hasan is a philosophy major, for instance, while Fleischmann is a computer science graduate who now works for Xerox.

Fleischmann has been in the club since it started, joining after trying his hand at a couple of open-mike nights at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach. The strongest of the current members, with a quirky observational bent and a relaxed, well-timed delivery, he now performs occasionally on his own, including a May 3 show at the Ice House in Pasadena.

“I actually make money once in a while,” said Fleischmann, who said he’d like to do stand-up full time but isn’t giving up his day job yet. Several members expressed a wish to perform professionally someday, while others hope to go into screenwriting.

Only Hurwitz, a senior English major who plans to pursue fiction writing, said he plans to drop stand-up entirely and has no aspirations to pursue comic writing. That doesn’t mean he can’t have fun: the back of his T-shirt reads “How Am I Walking?” complete with mock 800-number.

The UCI Comedy Club is open to UCI alumni and other non-students. Information: (714) 786-6925.