COMEDY : Sober Southern Accent Put on Dye’s Routine

Veteran comedian Jerry Dye, who speaks in a deep Mississippi drawl, is best known for what has been described as his “rural versus urban, fish-out-of-water” material: observations on, as Dye says on stage, “the crazy things y’all do out here in California that we don’t do in Mississippi.”

Such as the man he saw running one afternoon “for no reason at all.”

“Fella called it jogging,” Dye drawls in his act. “In Mississippi we call that stupidity. You ever see a redneck out there running, you better shoot him; he stole something. . . . Either that or somebody offered him a job.”

Here’s Dye on laid-back Californians’ blase attitude about earthquakes:

“You say, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. It’ll go away in a minute.’ . . . But let it rain two days in a row. . . . “

In a phone interview from his home in Anaheim, Dye, who’s headlining through Sunday at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach, said about his style: “I never put a word on it. All I can say is it’s contrasting humor--Mississippi versus educated states.”

Dye moved to Orange County 12 years ago via Chicago, where the former truck driver started his stand-up career in 1975. Like his “rural versus urban” observations, talking about drinking also has been a long-time staple of Dye’s act. But now there’s a new twist.

“I quit drinking about six months ago,” said Dye, who admits he does “everything in excess.”

“It’s so easy to become an alcoholic in the business I’m in because you’re always in the bars,” he said. “Without even thinking about it, you take a drink when you get out on stage, have another when you get off, and someone buys you one and so on.”

During his drinking days, it wasn’t even unusual for Dye to order a shot of Jack Daniels on stage, slug it down, and a few minutes later order another one. After downing it, he’d generate a laugh by saying, “I don’t mess with drugs; I don’t need drugs--I’m an alcoholic.”

In fact, Dye said, he never thought he had a drinking problem until he read a Times review of a show he did a few years ago at the Laff Stop.

“You become so used to drinking because you’re in that environment that you really don’t see yourself as having a problem until it’s pointed out to you,” he said. “If you have any sense at all, you evaluate yourself and say, ‘Maybe I do have a problem.’ ”

Dye admits he has to keep a pretty tight rein on himself. “The longevity in this business depends on your quick wit and demeanor on stage. If you drink to excess it cuts down on your control.”

Whereas he used to talk about drinking as a “participant” in his act, Dye said, “now I talk about it as something that is in my past.” But, he said, he doesn’t preach.

He’ll say, for example, that “you don’t always realize you have a drinking problem, but certain things will let you know you do have a drinking problem. Did you ever get real drunk, go out and get in your car and find out you’re home already?”

Even during his drinking days, Dye managed to maintain a sense of professionalism on stage. Indeed, the same Times review that pointed out his on-stage drinking praised him as “a masterful technician” and for being completely in control on stage.

Dye, however, said his sobriety has improved his performance: “I’m more cognizant now. Alcohol is like a sedative. It’s just like putting yourself on automatic pilot. You just do your show. You don’t ad-lib. You just do it verbatim each show.”

The comic said he also has been doing more writing since he stopped drinking. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m awake more.”

And, he noted, the more one writes, the easier it becomes.

“I think one of the problems with the young comics nowadays is they’re too wordy,” he said. “They have like a two-minute set-up for a really weak punch line. An old guy in Chicago, who had been doing comedy 50 years, said, ‘The least words you use, the better off you are.’ That’s the attitude I’ve tried to keep over the years. If I don’t get a laugh every couple of seconds I start to worry.”