Comedian Harland Williams has built a career on having fun

The first time comedian and actor Harland Williams traveled through Washington state, he was on his way to Hollywood.

He took a Greyhound bus through Washington, biked through Oregon and eventually made it to Tinseltown. But this wasn’t a trip to film a TV show or movie or even for an audition, it was simply to visit the city a young Williams knew he would live in one day.

“I went and stood in front of the Chinese Theatre and I looked at it, and I said, ‘I’ll be back.’ And then I went home, and I started stand up,” he said. “Then 10 years later, I moved to Hollywood.”

Years after that move, now with a steady stand-up career and credits in such films as “There’s Something About Mary,” “The Whole Nine Yards” and “RocketMan” to his name, Williams is back in Washington through Saturday to perform at the Spokane Comedy Club.

Williams turned to stand-up comedy after working toward a degree in animation. He found the medium exciting but also time consuming, because he was trained in classical animation which required drawing, inking and painting every cell by hand.

Having always thought of himself as a funny guy and looking for an art form that was a little more immediate, Williams considered stand up.

“You tell a joke and you get your result instantly in the moment versus waiting for years to see a finished animated film,” he said. “I wanted that immediacy. I wanted that instant feedback, and so I knew that stand up was the right fit for me so I could get that really quick turnaround in my product.”

For his earliest stand-up experiences, Williams wasn’t interested in talking about his everyday life or politics, anything grounded in reality, essentially. Reality, he said, is common, our everyday existence.

Instead, he would take his stand-up to weird, bizarre, fantastical places.

“I don’t like to get too serious, because to me, comedy is silly and funny,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about politics or abortion or all that stuff. I’d rather talk about a frog jumping around on a bag of Doritos or something …

“Stepping outside of a predetermined routine, it’s like I’m almost entertaining myself when I don’t know where it’s going. I think the audience picks up on that energy that I’m amusing myself and so they’re amused. It’s infectious and it’s fun.”

Williams has always been a fan of fun. He said he could be considered an original “Jackass” member or Tom Green, as he spent his teenage years filming pranks “with video cameras that required a battery pack.”

He also grew up bookended with comedic influences from America, like “Animal House” and “Saturday Night Live,” and Britain, like Monty Python, Benny Hill and “Fawlty Towers,” with influences from his native Canada, like “SCTV” and the country’s “silly culture” in the middle.

And as diverse as his influences, so too are his artistic interests. Throughout his career, Williams has appeared in film and TV, created his own TV show (“Puppy Dog Pals”) and voiced characters in movies, TV and video games.

Williams knew he would be an actor to some extent, having grown up skipping school to watch movies. Each time, he remembered looking at the screen and hearing a voice say “You’re going to be up there someday.”

He realized that stand-up would be a good way to get his foot in the door for on-screen and voice work, because performing on stage puts his talents front and center.

“You do stand-up and you’re good at it, everything is on display,” he said. “They can see you physically. They can hear your voice. They can see that you can write. They can see that you’re funny. Everything’s right there. It’s almost like an audition, but you’re doing a show … I realized everything could stem from my stand-up, if I did well and I did it right, and people reacted to it.”

Stand-up has also led to work as a writer for Williams, including films, like the upcoming “Wing Man,” and TV shows, children’s books and short story collections. He also hosts the “Harland Highway” podcast, which he posts for free on YouTube, and hand draws original artwork for his merchandise at harbling.com.

Williams said these interests didn’t come as he became more involved in the entertainment industry but rather existed in unison.

“As well as stand-up, I always was interested in art, being stimulated. Stand-up is one discipline, but I also love painting and writing and illustrating children’s books and writing movies, directing and acting,” he said. “If it’s artistic, I want to try it, and I want to try and conquer it too. It’s a real challenge to me, so any type of art form, I’m like, ‘Let’s go.’ If I was an athlete, I’d be one of those triathlon people that want to try all the different athletic disciplines.”

These interests all feed each other, with something from his podcast potentially appearing in a stand-up act, or a stand-up bit appearing in a movie he writes. It’s all one big ball of energy, he said, that allows him to pull from one discipline and inject it into another.

Looking at all the fun his career has brought him, Williams thanks God for blessing him with his creative abilities.

“I wake up every morning and I’m excited, and I’m like, ‘Let’s go! What are we going to create today?’ ” he said. “Whether you’re a construction builder or whatever you do in your life, if you’re creating, you’re living. That really keeps my engine running.”