Comedy : Pablo Francisco Uses His Many Voices to Sound Effect

Despite a successful debut, Pablo Francisco’s career as one half of a comedy team was short-lived. A week, to be exact.

As a high school student in Tuscon 10 years ago, Francisco and a fellow underage friend from down the street snuck into a local steakhouse for a comedy contest.

After sizing up the competition (“They have 8-by-10s. They’re going to kick our butts”), the young funnymen named themselves the Blowout Boys and won about $250. A week later, however, they had tapped out artistically, realizing that doing flips and jumping around on stage probably wouldn’t get them their own sitcom.

Francisco went solo.

He jettisoned the acrobatics and turned to his own jokes, skits, sound effects and offbeat thoughts, some of which he performs through Sunday at the Brea Improv.

“I like to throw in a little of everything,” said Francisco, a movie fan who spends about 10 hours a week studying acting. “Sometimes I get bored with myself just doing one voice.”

The Redondo Beach resident, 26, got hooked on his craft after watching Steve Martin on TV.

“As a kid, I was getting into him big time,” the comic said from home recently. “My father took me to see the movie ‘The Jerk’--that’s when I fell in love with it. I started buying Steve Martin albums and then discovered other comics.”

Francisco, who’d like to build his act into a one-man show, does a nice turn (complete with full sound effects) lampooning the over-the-top Mexican soap operas on the Telemundo network, as well as a takeoff on Arnold Schwarzenegger as a tortilla vendor.

After catching the attention of Improv managers in Tempe, Ariz., Francisco moved to the coast a year ago to work the chain’s Southern California clubs. The Brea gig is his first shot at headlining one, though he has headlined elsewhere. Stretching his routine from 30 minutes to 45 is no easy feat, and it has tripped up more than one budding headliner. Francisco, however, sees no problem.

“I still look at myself as an all-purpose comedian,” the good-natured comic said. “I’ll open. I’ll headline. I’ll follow anyone, unless it’s Jerry Seinfeld. That’s a problem.”

* Who: Pablo Francisco.

* When: Today and Sunday at 8:30 p.m., Friday at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. and Saturday at 8 and 10:30 p.m.

* Where: The Improv, 945 E. Birch St., Brea.

* Whereabouts: Take the Lambert Road exit from the Orange (57) Freeway and go west. Turn left onto State College Boulevard and right onto Birch Street. The Improv is in the Brea Marketplace, across from the Brea Mall.

* Wherewithal: $8 to $10.

* Where to call: (714) 529-7878.