MANSFIELD -- As waitresses deliver servings of apple pie and onion soup, postal worker Rick Fogarty is nervously working up to his first gig as an amateur comic.

`` You know I work for the Postal Service and everybody has an opinion about us,'' he says, once on stage. `` Recently we issued a new stamp with Vice President Dick Cheney on it, but customers were having a lot of problems with it. Then they figured out they were spitting on the wrong side.''

Ba-dum-bum.

For customers at Driscoll's Restaurant, the monthly comedy night is an unpredictable mixture of jokes, one-liners and verbal pratfalls served up alongside the chicken and steak entrees.

On a recent Saturday night, the family-style restaurant was nearly filled with comedy fans listening to a lineup of professional comics and a former headliner and backwards-spelling champ who used to go under the stage name `` Captain Backwards.''

`` I think they're getting it right,'' said standup and emcee Johnny Joyce. `` Usually you see comics in comedy clubs and bars. This is totally different.''

With comedy acts ranging from the largely innocuous to raunchy, comedy seems to be catching on here in the suburbs.

Proprietor Walter Driscoll, a former professional comic, decided to add a monthly comedy show a few months ago into a weekly entertainment schedule that features mostly musical acts.

`` People are very excited about it,'' said Driscoll, whose credits include Stitches and Catch a Rising Star. `` They don't have to leave town to see a good comedy show now.''

Funny family

It's no wonder that Driscoll fell in with a funny crowd. When he was just a kid, he cut his standup teeth on Dave Maynard's `` Community Auditions'' show. And Father Walter A. Driscoll III is still a working comic, as well as an actor.

That would be Driscoll's father, who performs as Father Driscoll, an ersatz Catholic priest with delusions of grandeur. The climax of the elder Driscoll's act is a rap segment based on the priest's bid for higher office.

`` Hey,'' he chants. `` I wanna be Pope.''

Later on, Emily Singer, a comic who has done turns on Comedy Central, turns in her performance as the prototypical single woman for whom relationships and everyday life are an unrelenting trial.

`` I go to restaurants where you see a sign that says `bathrooms for employees only,''' she says. `` I wouldn't mind, but it takes so long to fill out the applications.''

`` I don't know if you've heard about this thing called speed dating,'' she says. `` It's like you're in a room with other people, you spend eight minutes talking with a guy and then you switch and you're having another date.''

`` I got interested when I realized I've been in relationships that didn't last that long.''

Somewhere between the soup and the dessert course, deadpanning John Perotti takes aim at the audience as well as current events during his 15 minutes of schtick. Then there's Captain Backwards, a retired comic who, as it turns out, also used to work for the Postal Service. Backwards' specialty is taking requests from the audience in between wisecracks and proving that he can spell virtually any word backwards almost faster than a challenger can pronounce it.

The evening's headliner, Dave Andrews, arrives with a Les Paul guitar strapped to his chest. Andrews divides his time between a torrent of one-liners and musical impressions ranging from Jimmy Stewart to Tom Jones.

`` I'm divorced by the way,'' says Andrews. `` We split the house. I got the outside.''

For additional information on entertainment at Driscoll's, visit www.driscollsrestaurant.com.

RICK FOSTER can be reached at 508-236-0438 or vis e-mail at rfoster@thesunchronicle.com