PREMIERE: You and your wife, Viveca Paulin, have a three-year-old, Magnus, and in late December came Mattias. Is it the classic thing, after having the first you're now much more relaxed around the next?

You become borderline lackadaisical. At the hospital the nurse sums it up like, "The first baby, you sanitize. The second, you spit-polish."

And in your own life, as the first of two boys?

I was the first, so I probably got all the scrutiny.

And yet here you are in this godless profession of show business.

Yeah, I grew up — was born in Newport Beach, so I'm one of the Orange County entertainment mafia that includes Steve Martin, Kevin Costner, Michelle Pfeiffer, and No Doubt. But I grew up in Irvine and went to USC. My folks got divorced when I was eight years old; my brother was five. Dad's a musician, played a long time with the Righteous Brothers. He's keyboard, saxophone, and vocals. And I kind of watched the entertainment industry through his eyes and his experiences — the ups and downs of [life in] nightclubs. He came out here initially, then brought my mom, and they lived down in San Juan Capistrano at a motel; Dad played music and Mom was a cocktail waitress. This was Orange County in the '60s, before the tract homes and all that stuff.

So, not as romantic as it may sound. You've played a lot of misguided, frustrated musicians.

I definitely saw the ups and downs of what Dad had to go through, and my mantra even as a little kid was, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have a real job, I'm going to own a house and be a businessman. I didn't know what that meant as a little kid, but I wasn't going to do this crazy thing [he did].

Those income stops and starts can impinge on your sense of security.

Totally. And then of course slowly but surely as I went through school, I learned that it was easy for me to make people laugh and get friends that way — and I just instinctually loved comedy just from watching it. But I still kept it suppressed in the sense that I didn't go out for the high school play. I didn't do any of that.

I played tons of sports, and in college too. I ended up going to 'SC 'cause they had a sports journalism degree. And I thought, That's my way to have a legitimate job that's got a little bit of entertainment aspect to it. And then I got out of college and saw that, gosh, breaking into that field is almost as hard as being an actor. I really didn't have the toughness to try to get a tape together and get hired at, you know, a small TV station in Yuma, Arizona.

So it really wasn't till after college that I started taking classes at the Groundlings, started trying a little bit of stand-up comedy — 'cause in the early '90s, almost every place in town had a comedy night. I was really lucky. My mom was a huge influence in that she said, "As long as you keep doing, trying all these other things, you know you can live at home for free — this is your graduate degree. You've gotta get a job, get your gas money, but I'll give you this opportunity to explore all of these things."