By KEVIN NEVERS

He’s got a bit on spray cheese: “We want our food easy. How else do you explain spray cheese? ‘You know, I like cheese but it’s too much work.’”

Another one on doing nothing: “That’s my favorite activity. . . . That’s why I love rainy days. You wake up, you’re like, ‘Well, it looks like I’m not doing squat today. Too bad. I was probably going to go kayaking.’”

And, of course, the one on Hot Pockets: “Was there some kind of marketing meeting? ‘Hey, I got an idea. How ‘bout we fill a Pop Tart with nasty meat and you could cook it in a sleeve thing.’”

Do you see a pattern developing?

For Jim Gaffigan, breakthrough comedian and Dune Acres boy, comedy is about making what you know funny. And Gaffigan knows a little something about lethargy. “My material definitely skews to the couch potato philosophy, the lazy guy’s philosophy on life,” he says. “I’m a guy who loves food. I’m a guy who loves sleeping. You write about what you know. I do six minutes on ketchup. It’s a lazy man’s indulgence.”

In fact, Gaffigan can scarcely afford anymore to be lazy. He’s currently on a 26-city, six-month tour, “Comedy Central Live Starring Jim Gaffigan: The Sexy Tour,” which will bring him to the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville for two shows on Aug. 23. He’s got a regular gig on My Boys, a sitcom about a Chicago sportscaster, which TBS renewed for a second season this summer. And he just had a small role in The Love Guru, to add to his work in 13 Going on 30, Three Kings, and Super Troopers—among others—and appearances in That 70s Show, Sex and the City, Third Watch, and Law & Order.

(What does Gaffigan prefer, standup or acting? “I like doing both. It’d be like only eating bacon and not having sausage occasionally.”)

Gaffigan is also the brains—and the manly physique—behind Pale Force, a series of animated shorts produced by NBC and starring his likeness and an uncanny one of Conan O’Brien as a crime-fighting duo who blind malefactors with the ghastly sheen of their pasty white bodies.

(“Conan and I, we’re both pretty pale guys. I think there’s this secret shame about being pale. Summer comes around, and you’re like, ‘Oh no, I have to wear shorts now.’”)

So, in spite of himself, Gaffigan’s busy. It wasn’t always that way. “There are people who are definitely more efficient and less lazy than me,” he says. “But now my stuff on being lazy is a nostalgic fantasy of how it used to be.”

Gaffigan’s been kicking around the circuit for 18 years, but his big break came in 1999 on Letterman—arguably the world’s most famous Hoosier—when he killed with his stuff on the great State of Indiana (“I know what you’re thinking. Indiana. Mafia”).

Is Indiana inherently funny? Apparently it is to travelers who’ve had to get from Ohio to Illinois. “In New York the perception of Indiana is so lopsided,” Gaffigan says, “People ask me, ‘Did you ride a tractor?’ They’ll say, ‘Here’s a light bulb and a chair. You don’t have to sit on the ground anymore.’ A guy came up to me after a show and said, ‘Indiana? I drove through Indiana once.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I remember you. It was on the front page of the newspaper: Guy drives through Indiana.’”

(Probably, when you stop to think about it, it was on the front page of the Chesterton Tribune. Did Gaffigan read the Trib back in the day? “Absolutely. I totally read the Chesterton Tribune.”)

New York isn’t the only place where the alien landscape of Indiana gets a laugh. There’s flyover country even in flyover country. “A lot of people in Chicago are the same way. ‘Indiana? Where’s that?’ ‘Like, five minutes away.’ ‘Oh, I thought that was the road to Michigan.’”

One, two, three. . . . Wait for it.

“Well, yeah,” Gaffigan says, “I guess it is the road to Michigan.”

Here’s the really funny thing, though. “The difference between Chesterton and a suburb of New York City,” Gaffigan says, “is there’s none. People come from smaller towns on Staten Island. You could find almost identical places in Indiana. It’s all a perception thing.”

Even in Duneland, Gaffigan adds. “Growing up in Dune Acres, sure, there’s some wealthy people there. But there’s some incredibly wealthy people living in Chesterton. People in Portage, they say, ‘Yeah, Chesterton, that’s the rich town.’”

Gaffigan doesn’t do the Indiana shtick so much anymore.

“That was mostly my first album. You evolve in standup, and fans identify you through certain jokes. I’ve been the Pale Guy. Or the Bacon Guy. Now I’m the Hot Pockets Guy.”

One thing which has changed in his routine is his decision to eschew blue. “I used to curse,” he says. “I was never blue by industry standards, but I did curse. Eventually I learned it’s not really necessary. Eight years ago I made a point of not using that as a crutch. It’s more creative if you don’t. Now I’m a clean observational comedian. A 15-year-old can listen to my CD with his mom and neither one will be embarrassed.”

Gaffigan does manage now and then to return to Duneland to visit his brother Mitch, and in August 2004 he did a benefit at CHS for Duneland Xtreme Sports. But he’s dismayed to learn, during his interview with the Trib, that the Schoop’s Hamburgers on Indian Boundary Road has closed. “Man, I wanted to buy my niece a Green River.”

If you’ve got the itch to meet Gaffigan in person, buy a ticket to one of his two shows on Aug. 23 at the Star Plaza. Since the beginning of The Sexy Tour, Gaffigan has been meeting with every member of the audience who’s willing to wait around after the show. “It’s fun. It’s kind of a silly thing to do. I’ll sign your Hot Pockets box. If you’ve got a good tan, it’ll look even better in a photo next to me.”

And hey, here’s an Indiana joke for the road. “I don’t know who they named Gary after,” Gaffigan says, “but that guy had B.O.”

Posted 7/21/2008