COMEDY : John Wing’s Act Delivers Wry Without the Ham

If comics were cocktails, John Wing would be a martini--a very dry martini.

Consider these typical biographical musings, the punch lines uttered with Wing’s characteristically casual throw-away delivery:

* “I should mention that I’m not really from Canada. My father was just stationed there during the Vietnam War.”

* “I come from a small Catholic family. Nine children. . . . We were the smallest family on the block. The other kids used to tease me, call my mother frigid.”

* It was an unusual neighborhood. The church didn’t have an organ. It had an accordion. But I won’t forget Our Lady of Spain.”

Dry.

“Well, OK; I’m willing to accept that,” Wing said in a recent interview. “It’s a fairly basic comedy style. I try to do jokes just the way I talk, so it seems very natural. And I don’t go overboard with facial expressions or movement. I try to let the material speak for itself.”

His relatively low-key performance style has been honed over the past 12 years.

“As you go through the early part of your career you discover what gets you the biggest laughs, and invariably it’s the most natural part of you coming out that gets you the biggest laughs,” he said.

Growing up in southern Ontario, Canada, where he collected George Carlin comedy albums in high school, Wing wasn’t always so low key. “I suppose I was considered loud, boisterous and animated when I was in school,” he said. “But one of the reasons I got into performing was it took away my urge to be loud, boisterous and animated. It helped me not want to get the attention in every group I was in because I was able to get it on stage.”

Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles last week, Wing was preparing to get a mega dose of national attention by making his third appearance on “The Tonight Show” last Friday.

Wing has been honing new material for his “Tonight Show” set for months. “You try to time it out to five, 5 1/2 minutes, and it may end up going to six minutes with laugher and applause. One’s hopeful, anyway,” he said.

His entire act is the result of gradually turning over old material for new. “I tend to write my material in chunks of, say, five to 10 minutes and whenever I pick up an extra five or 10 minutes, something of the same length has to go,” he said. He added, however, that during the past two years he has been working on a routine “that now runs--if I do everything in it--35 minutes.”

The routine revolves around the theme of marriage and children and “contains maybe six or seven bits that are linked within the common theme. I do on average five to 10 jokes on each topic. And it goes somewhere, too. It’s like a Bach prelude--you feel you’re moving toward something.”

The routine began as a “good six minutes” Wing created for a “Tonight Show” appearance in 1991. “Things just build,” he said. “You write about what happens in your life. At least I do. What I write about happens to me or is something I’m particularly obsessed with. I was obsessed with my marriage, and now I’m obsessed with my child, so I tend to write about that mostly these days.” In fact, he said, his daughter is 4 months old. “But she’s reading at an 8-month-old level. . . . Which I’m very proud of.”

His “Tonight Show” appearance last week opened with a line that Wing wrote in June:

“I was sitting in my hotel room in Detroit last week. I was reading the Gideon Bible--no, no, I was watching ‘Studs.’ . . . And I realized that between me and Wilt Chamberlain we’ve slept with 20,000 and two women. . . . I don’t like to brag or anything, but let’s be honest. If men are reduced to numbering their sexual conquests-- then I have two.”

It’s a bit out of character for Wing to write topical jokes: Their shelf life isn’t that long.

“A good opening line can last you five years,” Wing said. Like his signature opening line, which he used on his first “Tonight Show” appearance:

“My name is John Wing. Wing is a Chinese name. In Chinese, it means the arm of a bird. “

Dennis McLellan is a Times staff writer who regularly covers comedy for OC Live! Who: John Wing.

When: Thursday, Dec. 3, and Sunday, Dec. 6, at 8:30 p.m.; Friday, Dec. 4, at 8, 10 and 11:45 p.m.; Saturday, Dec. 5, at 8, 10 and 11:45 p.m.

Where: The Laff Stop, 2122 S.E. Bristol St., Newport Beach.

Whereabouts: From the Corona del Mar (73) Freeway, take the Irvine Avenue/Campus Drive exit onto Bristol Street and go south one block.

Wherewithal: $7 to $10.

Where to call: (714) 852-8762.