WHACK JOB - IN BEST POSSIBLE WAY.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

DAVE GORMAN begins his show at UCLA's Macgowan Little Theatre with the line, ``I've got a very strange story to tell you.''

And he isn't kidding - or maybe he is. But the British comedian, who will be appearing at Macgowan through April 10, brings proof of his strange odyssey in the form of a slide show accompanying his entertainingly animated tale. The pictures are of airplane boarding passes, Internet messages, his reddish beard (which is still evident) and the people he met when he went Googlewhacking in the frantic few months before his 32nd birthday. (By the way, Gorman also has a bit of proof he brings along, but you'll have to see him yourself.)

But what in the world is Googlewhacking - or, more precisely, a Googlewhack - you may ask? A Googlewhack, as the madcap Gorman explains early in his manic and often hilarious discourse, is what you get when you put two words into the Google Internet search engine and only one Web site turns up. As it turned out, the comedian's own site, davegorman.com, was a Googlewhack, which Gorman learned when a fan e-mailed him (a shot of the e-mail appears on the screen).

Intrigued by this and needing a diversion to avoid beginning a novel on which Random House had given him an advance, Gorman went Googlewhacking. The urge to write a novel, by the way, came from Gorman's turning 30 and wanting to be taken seriously - thus the beard, too. Unfortunately, Random House did take him seriously, but Gorman was lacking inspiration. Googlewhacking, on the other hand, slowly took hold of him. It took four hours to come up with ``dork turnspit,'' which led him to www.womenanddogsuk.co.uk (perhaps not what you think). He then sent an e-mail to the site's proprietor, explaining that the site was a Googlewhack, and the two soon struck up a friendship.

After meeting his friend at womenanddogsuk, Gorman was challenged by another friend - also named Dave Gorman (the comedian had once gathered 50 of the same-named gentlemen for a party) - to have each of his Googlewhacks find two more Googlewhacks, each of whom he would then visit, until he had a chain of 10.

Gorman quickly dismissed the idea, but after a New Year's Eve party boast and a bottle of tequila, he was on a plane to Washington, D.C., which was only the beginning of a 90,000-mile obsession, taking little more than two months, with stops in China, Australia and Columbus, Ohio, and including encounters with a creationist, scientists, family men and a closeted gay man with a Kylie Minogue fetish, among others.

Gorman's story goes beyond obsession. It is one of serendipity and coincidence, of madness and delights, frustrations and triumphs.

Like master storytellers David Sedaris or the late Spalding Gray, Gorman has perfect timing and cleverly builds his tale incident by incident so that the audience soon feels part of the outrageous madness. (Who among us, after all, hasn't made procrastination an art form?) And, like Sedaris and Gray, there is ample irony in his tale, but less so the dark sort. Gorman's universe is comic, and the laughs come not from jokes but from the quirky coincidences and just plain weirdness.

In the end, Gorman's quest is like that of Quixote's - a form of insanity that yields some very funny truths.

Rob Lowman, [phone]

robert.lowman(at)dailynews.com

DAVE GORMAN'S GOOGLEWHACK! ADVENTURE - Four stars

What: The British comic takes audiences on a riotous journey to the wildest places on the World Wide Web.

Where: Macgowan Little Theatre, on the UCLA campus, Westwood.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 7 p.m Sunday; through April 10.

Tickets: $20 to $25. Call [phone] or go to uclalive.org.

In a nutshell:!rpt A Googlewhacking good time.

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DAVE GORMAN