Club to Let Bobcat Out of the Bag : Comedy: Freewheeling and unpredictable Goldthwait, who is ‘not above doing an Amy Fisher joke or two,’ performs at the Irvine Improv tonight.

His onstage delivery ranges from the quavering whine of a little boy tothe guttural growl of someone in need of an exorcist.

“Yeah,” Bobcat Goldthwait says in his act, “I’m pretty much every parent’s dream: ‘Hi! Is your daughter home? . . . I’ll have her home around 8--in a bag!’ . . . Oh, oh, oh, like you never killed a date before.”

There’s really no middle ground with Goldthwait; you either love him or avoid him like, well, a psychopath.

Goldthwait, who’s doing two shows at the Irvine Improv tonight, has in fact developed quite a cult following over the past decade.

“I’m not asking them to drink goat’s blood or anything but, yeah, I’ve always had a good group of folks,” he said by phone from his home in Los Angeles last week. “I don’t know what the appeal is of what I do, but there have been people who helped support me through this”--he giggled-- “Depression. “

As for the latest manifestation of Bobcat mania: “It seems a bunch of hackers have figured out my home phone number. There’s always a lot of that kind of strangeness, or people showing up at the house with baked goods. I think they look at me and go: ‘Let’s bring him snacks.’ ”

In recent weeks, Goldthwait has been on a tour that’s taken him from Miami to Chicago to Anchorage to Honolulu. (“Really a well-routed tour.”)

The comic, who’s known to target everything from David Duke to the National Rifle Assn., says he tries to keep his act current: “I’m sure Somalia will be in there, the fact that when George Bush went over there for some unknown reason he didn’t have one picture taken with a skinny baby. I think it was his attempt to say he improved things in two weeks so he’d get a (Nobel) Prize.”

Generally, Goldthwait said, “my act does change a lot. I’m not giving myself a compliment--I’ll still do some . . . old material--but it usually changes because I can’t retain things very well, and I like to talk about what’s going on. It’s like I’m always trying to sort out things. I don’t have an agenda; it’s always just me, and I may talk about something and find out what wigs me out about it.

“I’m not above doing an Amy Fisher joke or two.”

With credits including regular appearances on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” several HBO specials and movie roles in “Scrooged” and the “Police Academy” movies, Goldthwait takes being a celebrity in stride.

In one of his cable specials, he observes: “When I’m performing, I look out in the audience and my ego says, ‘All these people came to see you tonight.’ And (then) I remember, mechanical bulls used to be real popular too.”

Goldthwait says being famous “allows you to do things that you’re interested in.” In his case, that includes writing, directing and starring in his own movie, “Shakes the Clown,” a bleakly hilarious look at the world of professional clowns.

Critical response to the 1992 film, as Goldthwait pointed out, spanned the spectrum: from a review in an Oregon newspaper that called it “absolute excrement” to a Milwaukee critic who included it on his list of the year’s best movies.

“It’s pretty much like my act,” Goldthwait said of the film. “Nobody went to it and said: ‘Boy, I was really bored.’ Me and (pop-music parodist) Julie Brown snuck into a screening in L.A. A woman stood and yelled, ‘Jesus Christ!’--and there wasn’t anything going on in the middle of the scene. It was as though I had broken her will or something. And then she walked out of the theater. I felt really good about that.”

Goldthwait began doing stand-up at 15 after being thrown out of a punk-rock band in his hometown of Syracuse, N.Y. (As a singer, he admits, “I was terrible.”) His trademark stand-up delivery--one writer said he sounds as though he might suffer a “psychotic episode just uttering the phrase, ‘Thank you very much’ “-- comes naturally.

“I’m not comfortable up there,” he said, “and I would just find it hard for me to mask my uncomfortableness and be relaxed. I never really got up there and said: ‘At this point I have to scream,’ or ‘At this point I’m going to be real whiny.’ It’s kind of organic: It comes out when I’m up there. I find it really hard to act straight in a film or on stage. It’s like the most terrifying thing for me.”

Despite the discomfort, Goldthwait, who is working on more screenplays and continues to act, has no intention of quitting stand-up.

“I really like it,” he said, adding that it provides him a release for his anger. “Quite often I’ll go in a club at the end of the night . . . and I’ll do a set and just work out stuff.

“I think everyday life is completely overwhelming. People just don’t listen to each other and I think that’s why I like it up there. . . . I get to feel like I have a say in this completely out-of-control environment that we live in.”

* Bobcat Goldthwait will perform tonight at 8:30 and 10:30 at the Irvine Improv, 4255 Campus Drive , Irvine. $15 to $28. (714) 854-5455.