By John Loftus

Times Staff Writer

Tim Grill thinks he's just so funny, and he hopes everybody else does, too.

The 39-year-old Draper Street man is onstage through Saturday - that's Halloween - at the downtown comedy club Helium, where he's serving as the joke-cracking emcee.

"I'll do about fifteen minutes," he said of his task - warming up the audience for the evening's comics.

When he's booked at other clubs, he'll do about 40 minutes onstage. But Helium, at 20th and Sansom streets, is one of his favorite spots to perform. And Grill has taken the stage all over the region, and not just in comedy clubs.

"I've played Moose lodges and bowling alleys too," he said.

His first gig ever was in Delaware County, Grill recalled. Local, sort of, but still a long way from his Holme Circle neighborhood.

"I just did five minutes," he said of that mid-'90s debut, "and I was scared to death."

In the ensuing 12 years, Grill has broadened his experience while keeping his act pretty much free of vulgarity, even when dealing with hecklers.

"It's not that I don't curse," he said. "But I never use the 'F word.'"

The way he sees it, doing so is going for the cheap laugh, a desperate move that comedians often resort to when their jokes are leaving the audience stone-faced.

Comedians have an arsenal of barbs to throw at hecklers. Grill's putdowns are clean but merciless.

Pity the heckler who gets hit with, "If your parents had a Sophie's Choice, they

picked the wrong kid."

The idea, of course, is to shut up hecklers, but they don't always get it.

At a club in the Northeast, he said, he had guys come up onstage who wanted to fight him. "They were drunks," Grill said.

He doesn't, however, pick on audience members as part of his act. "I know comedians who do that, and it used to happen more often," he said.

He also knows audience members are aware of that, and they don't like it. "I've had people ask me, 'Please don't pick on me.' I don't do that," Grill said.

Besides, there's another good reason to go easy on the audience.

"I've seen fights break out," the comedian said.

When he isn't cracking jokes, Grill, a graduate of Father Judge High School and Holy Family University, is a 9-to-5 social worker in New Jersey. He's likely to keep it that way.

Comedy is a lot of laughs, but "it doesn't pay that well, especially in Philadelphia," Grill said. "You can't make a living at it."

He blames cable TV for destroying what had been a boom in comedy. "Cable lets people sit at home and watch comedy on TV," he said.

Then there are the guys who just swipe his material. Grill writes his own stuff and sometimes hears it being performed by other comedians.

"They say imitation is the highest form of flattery," Grill said, "but I don't know."

He sometimes hears one of his jokes used by a comedian who has gone onstage before him. Not only is that galling, Grill said, but it calls for some quick thinking.

"I've had to take jokes out of my act because I heard comedians use it before I went onstage," he said.

Grill's opening material, however, isn't likely to be lifted. He has spina bifida - and he talks about that first.

"I do about fifteen jokes about it," Grill said.

When he walks onto a stage, "people see something is wrong, so I address it up front and get it over with," he explained.

That done, Grill turns to material that spans the online dating scene to growing up in an Irish Catholic family.

And then there's music, a big part of an act for a comedian who also plays guitar.

Even if a performance isn't going particularly well, music changes the act and brings back the audience, he said.

And Grill is hoping for a much wider audience. Last Sunday he had an audition to appear on NBC's America's Got Talent.

No word yet on the outcome. But as Tim Grill can tell you, funny things happen a lot in life.

Reporter John Loftus can be reached at 215-354-3110 or jloftus@phillynews.com