Comedian Chris Clobber answers his phone with a long sentence in French when he doesn't recognize the incoming number.
"I just do that to throw off people," he said.
His brand of comedy is the same way. To get a laugh, he freaks out the audience instead of trying to relate.
"I will take unusual things that you don't always talk about and then make them funny," he said, referring to Camel smokers sounding like camels when they yell, or how he emulates the sound of a singing, drowning dog. "I'm an abstract comic. How many people do you know make camel sounds when they're smoking? Nobody can relate to it. Are people at home drowning dogs? No. We don't know why it's funny. It is abstract humor. If I've done my job, you laugh your ass off and you have no idea why it was funny to you."
Clobber headlines Wednesday night at Laff's Comedy Club at 6001 San Mateo Blvd.
He used to work at the San Diego Zoo, where he learned how to make animal sounds each morning before the zoo opened, which later fed into his stand-up routines.
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"I can duplicate any animal sound," Clobber said. "I have a strange sense of audio memory. I almost remember everything that I hear, no matter how stupid."
He also did animal sound effects for television and took a job writing for "Lamb Chop's Play-Along."
"I make very, very funny socks," Clobber said. "I made laundry hilarious."
Animals seem to be the running theme in his life.
"I did sound effects for the zoo's TV commercials," he said. "I got so bored that I started combining them and doing my own, and I came up with sounds for animals that don't exist. So, if I did a goat impression, it would be Stevie Nicks/goat combination."
When he does gigs for American troops in Iraq, they ask him to remind everyone in the states they're still over there fighting and suffering.
"They were very appreciative," he said. "What amazes me is the degree of selflessness they show. They appreciate the fact you're coming for them. 'Say hello, and don't let anyone forget we're out here. When you get home, remind them we're here.'"
Clobber isn't choosing sides when it comes to pointing a funny bone at politicians.
"Some comics have a distinctive point of view," he said. "For me, the best comics slam everyone equally. If you go after one political viewpoint, you have to cover the other one as well. In that sense, we are truly democratic."
Sometimes, Clobber blows on a harmonica to segue from random joke to joke, or maybe it's something to do with his hands to channel the nervous energy.
"I have bipolar tendencies. My style is bipolar in the sense that one minute I'm completely calm, and then I'm on a tangent about something, but I always come back to the point," he said. "There's a lot of free-flow, stream-of-consciousness diatribe. Other people will take your standard observation about the world that everybody can relate to, like boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, and the differences between New York and L.A."
He said that friends of a bipolar person will perform an intervention to get them on drugs.
"It's kind of a reversal," Clobber said. "People say, 'Here, please take these pills. You're an ass.'"
For more information, call Laff's Comedy Club at (505) 296-5653.
