Los Angeles-based comic Jason Stuart has always been funny, but never expected it would become a career 20 years ago when he first signed on as a struggling actor.

“My manager talked me into it,” he said. “I never wanted to do it. It was 20 years ago, and I was very, very young. At the time, there weren’t as many comics, so I just thought it would be a way to help me get acting work.”

Stuart has done standup at The Comedy Store, The Laugh Factory, Punchline and Improv among others, and also at comedy festivals across North America. He has also worked extensively in theatre, and has appeared in feature films, including Vegas Vacation with Chevy Chase, Kindergarten Cop with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lost and Found with David Spade and HBO’s Gia with Angelina Jolie.

Now touring with his comedy lecture, “Coming Out in Hollywood: Making it in the Middle”, Stuart said his upcoming show in San Diego will be called “My Big Fat Gay Jewish Comedy Tour”.

“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry; it’s better than Cats,” he said. The show features anything and everything that Stuart encounters in his life on a daily basis: family, politics, getting older, pop culture, traveling, marriage for gays and lesbians, the military and a spot-on impression of a “Star Search”/“American Idol” singer.

“I think funny, that’s all,” he said of where he comes up with his material. “My job is to set it up right so the audience thinks it’s funny, too. If I have to see Anna Nicole Smith one more time jog around with those big boobs, I’m going to kill myself. She was jogging by my house the other day and one of her boobs hit her in the head and she passed out. She was on my lawn for three weeks. That’s why she lost the weight.”

Unlike many comics, Stuart does not write his material out beforehand. “Whatever hits me – whatever is going on in my life,” he said. “What I do is, I’ll think something is funny when I’m talking to somebody and I’ll write down, ‘that thing about Jennifer Lopez’ or ‘that thing that happened with my dad’, and then I’ll bring it onstage and I’ll work it out.”

Now that he has been doing standup for so long, he has at least an hour and a half of memorized material at the ready, but it was not always so smooth.

“My comedy came out of being nervous and scared in front of people,” he said. “Isn’t that weird? And also from being treated badly as a kid growing up because I was gay, so in the back of my mind I always thought if I did comedy, people would know I was gay.”

Stuart was not “out” for the first 10 years of his career. “I never did anything gay,” he said. “It wasn’t even a choice in my head; I couldn’t comprehend that. Too frightening. [Ultimately] I just decided that it was more important to be an openly gay person than it was to be in show business.”

The risk paid off. Now one of the top openly gay actor-comics in the industry, Stuart has appeared on “Will & Grace” twice, “Three Sisters”, “Providence”, “The Drew Carey Show”, “Charmed” with Shannon Doherty, “Murder, She Wrote” with Angela Landsbury and “Sunset Beat” with George Clooney.

He has been featured on Comedy Central’s “Out There in Hollywood” with Scott Thompson of “Kids in the Hall”, and now has a regular gig playing a gay therapist on “My Wife and Kids” with Damon Wayans on ABC. He stars in 10 Attitudes, a romantic comedy about looking for love in all the wrong places. The film recently won best picture at the Barcelona Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Stuart said about being an openly gay performer. “With some things, it’s wonderful, and sometimes… Today some club that I’d worked before wasn’t sure they wanted to [book me] because they didn’t think it was safe. They’re afraid. You’ll go places and you’ll make money for people and they won’t remember that, they’ll only remember their fears. I work in film and television and I work in comedy clubs, gay events and colleges, so financially I’m lucky that it hasn’t affected me, but there are times somebody will just say something so stupid. You just have to go to where the love is.”

Important topics in Stuart’s repertoire these days are marriage and dating: “I’m always adding new things that have happened… My biggest thing right now is gay marriage. ‘This is the year 2004’, I want to say to straight people, ‘If you let us marry each other we’ll stop marrying you’.”

Stuart will perform Fri., Mar. 5, and Sat., Mar. 6, at 8:00 p.m. at the Adams Avenue Studio of the Arts, 2804 Adams Ave. Call (619) 584-3593 for tickets and information.