“I’m coming home! Get my bedroom ready!” Ian Bagg fake-enthuses on the phone from his home in Long Beach, California. The standup comic and Terrace, B.C., native best known for his top-five finish on NBC’s most recent season of Last Comic Standing has been living in the U.S. for 20 long years. But he says Vancouver is where he became a man.

Our town was Bagg’s base for four years in the mid ’90s, and he started his standup career at Punchlines in Gastown and Yuk Yuk’s at the Plaza of Nations with the likes of Bonnie McFarlane, Pete Johansson, Craig Campbell, and Peter Kelamis. While the aspiring comic was still an amateur, Pat Bullard (brother of comedian and former Canadian talk-show host Mike) pulled him aside and said, “I need you to promise me you’ll move to America as soon as you can. You can’t stay here. There’s nothing going on. Show business is in America.”

Bagg took US$600 and moved to New York, where he lived in a youth hostel for $17 a day, and got paid $25 under the table to perform at the Comic Strip. “The funny part is I got my ass handed to me every night,” Bagg says. “I would go on-stage and just bomb for about two weeks, and then all of a sudden it just started to click in.”

After six months, he was seen by the bookers of Conan O’Brien’s late-night show, who helped him get his work papers. And he’s been there ever since.

Bagg stood out on Last Comic Standing with his carefree act. He looked like he was having more fun than anyone else there. “The only time I was tight was the first round, because all I could think was ‘What if I can’t even get through one round of this stupid show?’ ” he says. “It absolutely would have been the most embarrassing thing!”

He says he wasn’t out to win, and knew he wouldn’t. “The reason I did the show was to put my face in front of people that had never heard of me before,” he says. It worked. Now he says he doesn’t have to search for bookings nearly as much, his pay is better, and he gets meetings with higher levels of production companies. He recently filmed a new special with Paul Miller, the Comedy Central director, who saw him on Last Comic Standing and contacted his agent.

Bagg is the king of crowd work, engaging with as many people during his rapid-fire set as he can fit in. “I like talking with people; I don’t like talking at people,” he says. “If you’re shy, don’t worry. You’re in a solid professional’s hands. I can tell when people are nervous. I don’t want to make people that are insecure feel bad about themselves. That’s not what I’m about. I’m about people having fun. I’ll pull out right away if somebody’s uncomfortable. If they’re a dick, I’ll go harder. But I want them to have fun.”

It often takes some time before a comedian has the confidence and competence to veer off prepared material and converse with the crowd, but Bagg’s done it since day one, when the jokes he had scrawled on his hand got swept off by nervous sweat before he hit the stage, forcing him to talk to the audience.

“I was very deadpan at the time,” he says. “Steven Wright was huge and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s how you do it. You don’t really give any emotion.’ It took me a while to be myself as a crowd-work guy. Now I would say for the last 10 years I’ve been me. I’m just me in concentrate on-stage.”

Ian Bagg headlines five shows at the Comedy MIX from Thursday through Saturday (November 3 to 5), with MC Dan Quinn and Sophie Buddle.