Being taken on life’s joyride

Dave Gorman often seems to be laughing when he takes the stage, as if he’s reliving a private joke with himself. He’s probably not chuckling at a line of his own but rather at the strange and astonishing people he’s met while building his routine -- and perhaps the sense that he’s survived it all.

The pale, gangly Gorman, once a stand-up comedian in his native England, now practices what a London Times reviewer dubbed “documentary comedy.” His latest show, the globe-trotting “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure,” comes to the Macgowan Little Theatre on March 23 as part of UCLA Live’s British Comedy Invasion.

The story begins, more or less, with Gorman waking up in Britain’s Heathrow Airport with a plane ticket for Washington, D.C., in his pocket. As outlandish as the tale gets as it goes along, it’s all true, he says.

“If a story is funny, and I made it up, then the big message is, ‘Aren’t I clever?’ ” Gorman says from his East End home. “If a story is funny and it actually happened, the big message is, ‘Isn’t the world funny?’ And actually I think that’s a better message. I kind of want to think that about the world -- and it sounds less like boasting.”

Gorman’s latest adventure, which he’ll recount at UCLA, involves landing a book deal, wasting time on the Internet and being greeted by a random Australian e-mailer who asked him: “G’day Davo, Did you know that you are a Googlewhack? Stevo.”

The term refers to a combination of two words (which the Aussie found on Gorman’s website) that leads to only a single hit when entered into the Google search engine. Most two-word combinations yield thousands of pages; a person can lose entire days searching for those that show up only once. Gorman did just that -- his first involved a potentially scandalous Birmingham-based website involving women and dogs -- and traveled around the world searching out other examples.

The show, which won an award from the 2004 HBO U.S. Comedy Festival, led to two weeks at the Sydney Opera House and three weeks off-Broadway. Time Out New York praised Gorman’s “obvious delight in the peculiarities of others.”

Though Gorman’s story seems to be about the Web, or computers, it’s really about more sweeping themes: procrastination, obsession and the world’s delightful randomness.

“In the space of about eight weeks I traveled more than 90,000 miles,” he says, “and there are still no airline jokes. It’s not about sitting behind a gray box at a desk; it’s about meeting people and going places.”

The tale’s reality also makes the scary parts scarier. “As the story goes on, I’m in real jeopardy. My favorite moments aren’t when I hear the laughs but when I hear gasps of shock. The moments when I hear the audience holding its breath collectively.

“They are delicious to a performer, because it means you are 100% engaged in what I’m saying.”

Gorman, 34, grew up in the small West Midlands market town of Stafford, where he fell for the comedy on British TV: Monty Python, “The Young Ones,” Buster Keaton and scores of English comedians whose names never traveled. He also loved wild-and-crazy-guy-era Steve Martin, especially his combination of energy and intelligence.

Gorman, a serious and thoughtful chap over the phone, began doing stand-up while at the University of Manchester and had some success at it. But he eventually grew bored when he realized he lacked life experience and his jokes lacked heart.

His turning point came in 1998 when Gorman wrote an entire show based on the 1979 song “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

“All the people I work with were panicking: ‘Oh my God, we think Dave’s gone mad. That’s commercial suicide; what’s he doing?’ ”

As he put together work-in-progress previews, Gorman found himself telling audiences how he’d come up with the idea and every detail of research into the song’s extensive lyrics.

“Every time I told them a true bit about the making of the show, it got a bigger reaction than any of the jokes I had written,” Gorman recalls. “And I promise you the jokes weren’t that bad.

“It’s a really complicated lesson; it’s counterintuitive for a comedian. I basically started taking the jokes out, and the show got funnier.” He calls the result “a 90-minute stage show about a four-minute pop song.”

“It was nowhere near the best show I’ve done, but it was the one that was a complete leap in the dark.”

The shows that followed included “Dave Gorman’s Important Astrology Experiment,” in which he lived his life entirely based on his horoscope, and “Are You Dave Gorman?” in which he travels the world looking for namesakes. Time Out London’s Malcolm Hay called the latter “the funniest and most absorbing show I’ve seen this year.”

In part because his shows are based on the truth and on winning an audience’s confidence, Gorman doesn’t attack the stage like the standard smarmy comedian. There’s no expensive jacket or tousled hair, no hand-held microphone or stock politics jokes or gratuitous cursing. Rather, he’s a kind of open-minded Every-bloke, with a touch of East End geek-chic.

“I don’t want the audience to sit there and think, ‘This is stand-up comedy and I know where this is going,’ ” he says. Onstage is pretty much the real him, just projected more boldly. “I think I’m being me.”As for which of his next misadventures or obsessions will lead to a show, Gorman says he can’t fake the serendipitous feeling of falling into something that ends up being unaccountably funny.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a year now,” he says. “And I realized I like not knowing the answer. I want to wait for life to take me.”

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‘Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure’

Where: Macgowan Little Theater, UCLA, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: April 10

Price: $20 and $25

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.ticketmaster.com