Wayans Is Stand-Up Guy When He Needs to Be

Damon Wayans, who created a memorable gallery of characters a decade ago on Fox TV’s comedy sketch show “In Living Color,” spends most of his time these days writing and acting.

But the comedian, who recently finished filming a movie with director Spike Lee, is doing his first club gig in four months.

That’s good news for fans who show up at the Irvine Improv tonight through Sunday, but stand-up isn’t necessarily good news for Wayans.

“I do it every time I’m about to commit suicide,” he joked. “I get on stage and talk myself out of it. It’s kind of therapeutic for me.”

Actually, the soft-spoken Wayans said by phone from his Beverly Hills home, he just completed a script for a movie about stand-up comedy that he plans to direct and star in, “so I’m kind of working on [stand-up] material for the movie.”

Not that Wayans needs to research what it’s like to be a comic; he’s been doing it since 1982. And, he said, “that’s all the research I need to find out that comics are the most insecure, angry people on the planet.”

Wayans performs occasionally late at night at the Comedy Store and the Improv in West Hollywood. “I just go up and kind of talk,” he said. But his touring days are over.

“I’ve got teenagers,” he said, then laughed. “If I toured, they’d be driving my car. They hope that I tour.”

Wayans’ penchant for performing began when he was growing up in Harlem--how else do you capture the attention of your parents and nine brothers and sisters?

Although he and three of his siblings followed the path blazed by older brother Keenan Ivory Wayans, Damon Wayans said he wasn’t sure what he’d end up doing with his life: “It was either be a funny inmate or a funny guy working at McDonald’s. I knew somehow I needed to make people laugh.”

He still does.

“I took a couple of years off stand-up and I was miserable,” he said. “Stand-up is like the gym for me. It all starts at the gym: It opens your mind to writing, to acting also. It’s kind of like a drawing board where I can go and kick-start my creativity.”

Wayans describes his stand-up act as “just trying to search for my truth, my point of view on things--on life, on love, on everything: How do I feel about whatever subject I want to talk about?”

Take, for example, Tom Hanks’ hit prison movie “The Green Mile,” which Wayans found depressing.

“Everybody is praising this movie and I’m sitting around saying, ‘Wait a minute. I hate that movie, and who can I tell?’ So I go up on stage [and talk about it.]

“It’s funny to me how much people like that movie. They love it. They sit there crying and thinking, if only they were that big and dumb.” He laughed. “Unfortunately, they couldn’t find a better actor than this guy, Michael Clark Duncan. Get Denzel [Washington] or someone who could find more levels to play than just crying over corn bread.”

Although comedy club audiences undoubtedly expect Wayans to trot out his best-known comedy characters from television, he doesn’t always oblige them.

“For me, the characters--that’s easy,” he said. “I don’t want my stand-up to be a bunch of characters, so I try to refrain sometimes.”

He said, however, that while at the Irvine Improv he’ll probably include a character-filled routine he’s been working on.

It’s one in which Major Payne, the gung-ho Marine he played in the 1995 comedy, is addressing the troops: Homey the Clown, Anton, (the hopelessly disheveled street person), Handiman (the physically challenged superhero), and others.

Wayans said the routine gives the audience his characters “in a way that’s kind of a challenge for me--to do them all at once.”

But he prefers simply getting on stage and talking.

And at this point in his stand-up career, Wayans said, “a lot of it is improv within a structure. I have topics I’m talking about, but I need my audience to kind of relax with me and know it’s going to be funny. But you’ve got to let me figure it out. That adrenaline rush makes you find all the [funny] stuff.”

With a laugh, he added, “There’s nothing like being on the edge of a cliff.”

* Damon Wayans, Irvine Improv, Irvine Spectrum, 71 Fortune Drive. 8:30 and 10:30 tonight; Saturday, 7, 9, 11 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. $25. (949) 854-5455.