He <i> Seems </i> Like Such a Pleasant Young Man . . . : Comedy: Onstage, Harland Williams appears clean-cut and freshly scrubbed, but there’s something a little off, as if Emo Phillips had gone skinny-dipping in Jimmy Stewart’s gene pool.

Harland Williams has a special way of making friends. “Let me make it up to you,” the comic says from the stage of the Laugh Factory, to an audience member whom he has just called, in the most genial manner imaginable, “Flapjack Ass.” “What’s your favorite tree? If it’s not too much to ask, what is your favorite tree?”

Oak or elm or some such is mentioned, and Williams responds, “This is just for you, little buddy,” and he does a perfect imitation of a garrulous chain saw. “I just cut your little tree, down, sir,” Williams says, obviously very proud of himself.

Onstage, Williams, 31, appears clean-cut and freshly scrubbed, but there’s something just a little off, as if Emo Phillips had gone skinny-dipping in Jimmy Stewart’s gene pool. With a big, innocent grin perpetually across his face, he chats with his audience extensively and is unfailingly polite--in demeanor, at least; the actual words emanating from his mouth tend to be fairly skewed. With a cheerful lilt in his voice, he’ll call a woman “my little bag of cheese twists,” or threaten a club patron, “I’ll go wake up William Shatner and have him come slap you across the head with a freshly carved canoe paddle!”

And, in what is shaping up as a bona fide catch phrase, whenever an audience member tells him something extraordinarily uninteresting, Williams will brightly exclaim, “Well, isn’t that a spring treat!”

Williams has been performing in Los Angeles for two years, after seven years of stand-up in Toronto. “After my first Los Angeles show,” he recalls, “I walked offstage and (comedy manager) Rick Masina asked me if I wanted to perform on (A&E;’s) ‘Comedy on the Road.’ My head was spinning like an owl hit by a fastball. It was like, seven years of work in Toronto versus seven minutes in L.A.” (Williams is now managed by Eric Gold, who also manages the Wayans brothers.)

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Williams is a tad hard-pressed to name influences, or comics he admires.

“Without sounding negative, I’m not a huge fan of a lot of stand-up. I’m more interested in an absurd kind of theater. I don’t laugh so much at jokes and premises as I do at a guy who goes onstage and starts twitching and acting funny. I like being taken for a ride, compared to traveling down a more traditional path.”

That sensibility has made him one of the Laugh Factory’s most popular comedians, according to owner and manager Jamie Masada, and has even inspired a small cult of Harlandologists--fans who come for his set only, and leave immediately after his performance.

“They’re like comedy groupies,” Masada says. “I haven’t seen anything like it in my 15 years at this club, for someone who’s not that well-known to have such a loyal following. A party of 40 women from Westwood called to find if Harland was going to be on--it was a bachelorette party, this woman was getting married the next morning, and the last thing she did before the wedding was come see Harland.

“I think he is going to be one of the major, major comedy stars.”

Now, television is discovering Williams: He’s appeared on the usual comedy programs--”Comic Strip Live,” “Evening at the Improv,” MTV’s “Half-Hour Comedy Hour” and “Kamikaze” (in which he played a man who answered the philosophical queries of his half-dog, half-air-conditioner pet in bucolic surroundings). He’ll soon appear on a new game show on MTV, “Trashed!,” portraying a nature-show host. The Fox network is expected to offer him a development deal early in the New Year.

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All this is just fine by him--he left Canada for L.A. for that precise reason (Canada’s film and TV industry being rather anemic by comparison, he explains). But he acknowledges that the quirkiness that makes him a fave rave onstage is precisely the sort of thing that can get lost in the translation in the mainstream media.

“I get a lot of people telling me that I’d make a good ‘wacky neighbor,’ ” Williams says. “I wouldn’t mind that, if it was a starting-off point. If you look at Kramer (from ‘Seinfeld’) or Jim (from ‘Taxi’), it was good for them, it suited them. But I’d like to have my own vehicle as well.

“I’d like to explore the more abstract side of people’s minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff,” he continues. “I don’t want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I’d want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.”

Won’t that be a spring treat?