NONFAT CHUCKLES : It’s Strictly Lean, Mean Jokes and Rapid Delivery for John Mendoza

Comedian John Mendoza didn’t have any trouble coming up with a title for his Showtime special to be taped at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday.

He calls it “Just Jokes.” Short and to the point, just like Mendoza’s sharp and succinct comedy style.

The ex-New Yorker with the laid-back I’ve-seen-it-all-and-I’m-not-impressed attitude never lingers long on any one subject. He simply stands on stage and, with his trademark deadpan demeanor, dispenses his freewheeling collection of sardonic observations on human nature:

“I hate kids; they’re like old people with energy.”

“You know what the abbreviation for July is? J-U-L. You’ve gotta be in a hurry.”

“Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?”

Mendoza, a former “Star Search” comedy competition winner who appears regularly on “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman,” has been on the road for the past month honing material for his first solo cable showcase. His “Just Jokes” special will air on Showtime in December.

The comedian’s somewhat detached stage persona was not by design.

“I got that actually from fear when I first started doing stand-up: Standing there and praying that it worked,” he said in an interview. “I’d look at the floor, look at the ceiling. Eye contact was not one of my major sports.”

A former liquor company employee, Mendoza went to his first comedy club, New York City’s Catch a Rising Star, in 1976. It was a revelation: “That an average Joe could get up there and do that. I thought what a great way to make a living, just making people laugh.”

It nevertheless took him three years before he worked up the nerve to get on stage, recalled Mendoza, whose sardonic sense of humor “is pretty much my perspective of life.”

And his style of doing only short jokes?

“That was just me,” he said. “I could never stand there long enough to tell long stories.”

As he sees it, “all my jokes are like little cartoon strips. I try and make it so you can visually see what is happening. I do one like: I went sky-diving. One of the guys I went sky-diving with was blind. Did you ever hear a German Shepherd scream at 10,000 feet?”

A Hollywood director once told Mendoza he had timing like Jack Benny. His adept timing was a natural evolution. “What would happen is I’d do a joke and I found out if I paused an extra second it gave the audience time to think,” he said.

Sometimes that extra second comes in handy for an audience when, for example, Mendoza ponders:

“What if there were no hypothetical situations?”

Or: “I saw a videotape at Blockbuster the other day on how to hook up your VCR.”

Mendoza, who writes all of his own material, said it’s much more difficult coming up with an hour’s worth of short observations than it would be if he were more of a storyteller.

“If you have a character like, say, a Howie Mandel, you can laugh for 30 seconds and not have to worry about writing a line,” he said. With himself, however, “you have to have that response constantly. I started to write it down one time and said I’m not going to do this to me: I figured I do 20 jokes every five minutes.”

And when he writes a joke, he said, all excess fat is trimmed away from each line.

“It’s all, ‘Boom! Here you go: Here’s the picture, thank you very much, let’s move onto the next picture.’ I use the least amount of nouns, pronouns and adjectives as possible.”

Mendoza figures he writes about 1,000 jokes over the course of a year and uses only about 100 of them in his act. “I’ve got books of stuff that just don’t work,” he said.

That’s the advantage of his quick style: If a joke doesn’t go over, he’s onto the next one before he has time to die on stage. Said Mendoza: “It’s almost like that New York attitude of seeing an accident on the street. You step right over it, ‘I didn’t see that.’ ”

Who: John Mendoza.

When: Saturday, Sept. 14, at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: On the UC Irvine campus, across from the Irvine Marketplace shopping center. Going south on the San Diego Freeway, take the Jamboree exit and go west to Campus Drive, then left on Campus.

Wherewithal: $12.50 and $10.

Where to call: (714) 854-4646.