by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Stand-up comedy and illustration seem diametrically opposed. The former is off the cuff, a sink-or-swim situation right in the public eye, the latter solitary and perfect for perfectionists. The tastes and talents of Harland Williams—actor, comic, illustrator, writer and soon-to-be director of the CGI feature Route 66 from Dreamworks—allow him to indulge in both. When he’s not doodling funny creatures for his numerous children’s books (the Lickety-Split series, for instance), Williams is coaxing guffaws with his turns in flicks like Half Baked, Freddy Got Fingered and the Farrelly Bros. filmography, or knocking ’em dead on stage.

“I like that exposure,” says the Toronto native, now living in the Hollywood Hills, “being out in front of a crowd and bearing it all, and I love the solitude of being alone in my studio and focusing on just what’s right in front of my eyes, meticulously doing a brush stroke or finding that right curve.”

If there’s a common factor to Williams’s two callings, it’s the microscopic quality of his off-kilter imagination. “I like my art fine-tuned,” he says of his preference for detail and craftsmanship in drawings. His comedy, meanwhile, takes the familiar and zooms in tight enough to find the weirdness lurking there.

As surreal and bizarre as he gets, Williams rarely stoops to the naughty or nasty in pursuit of laffs. “It’s something that I made a point of doing when I got started. I thought, ‘I don’t want to go there, I don’t need it, and I want to do a show where I don’t offend anyone.’ What’s interesting is, after doing this for 20 years, maybe in the last three or four years, I do have a few profanities in my act, just because I got bored of being so squeaky-clean all the time. It’s not just for the sake of doing it. If I gotta use a bad word, I want to use it for a creative reason.

“I do have a few jokes that could be considered bluer, just because there’s some innuendo, but they’re fun, they’re innocent.” Innocence could be Williams’s middle name—if you’ve seen him on screen getting all golly-gee-shucks like some Jimmy Stewart in Reeboks, or mooning over some cuddly “little buddies” from the animal kingdom, you might have thought the ingenuous Mister-Nice-Guy routine was a put-on.

Believe me, it ain’t. Get him started on the bobcats and coyotes on his property and you can hear him getting all dewey-eyed. And how ’bout those adorable poisonous invertebrates? “I bought a terrarium and filled it with anything I could find in my surrounding environment. I’ve got lizards I caught in my garden, beetles, spiders, a scorpion I caught, caterpillars, snails—it’s like a fish tank, I just sit there and watch these guys do their thing. It’s kinda fun!”

Now, a guy who calls scorpions his lil’ pals seems like the perfect patsy for the treachery and sleaze inevitably associated with Hollywood, but Williams is no naif. “There is a level of that here. I think it’s all about focusing on your own perspective. If you try to look for the good and the innocent in things, you have a better chance of finding it. If you let more corrupt people, people with a secret agenda, be your focus, that’ll become your world as well. I try to keep my distance from those people and that type of vibe, and I think I’ve succeeded.”

With Casey Corbin at Bourbon Street West
on Saturday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m., $22.50