“My name is Matt and I look like an enormous toddler.”

Matt Braunger introduced himself on “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” last year, pointing out the obvious. At well over 6 feet tall and with a head of messy dark curls, Braunger has a youthful energy and an easily peaked enthusiasm that do indeed remind one of an overgrown, if slightly better mannered, toddler.

This may be what makes the 37-year-old comedian with Portland roots so successful in his stand-up act: Braunger’s signature brand of earnestly delivered, largely anecdotal comedy that tends toward the goofy and the bizarre will be featured in an hour-long stand-up special on Comedy Central. The special, “Matt Braunger: Shovel Fighter,” will debut July 14.

Braunger, who was born in Chicago, recalls fondly his childhood in Portland. He attended Grant High School before moving to New York and later Chicago, finally settling in Los Angeles. Classmates and teachers told him, “You’re going to be a stand-up comedian.”

Braunger returned to Portland to record his first comedy album, “Soak Up the Night,” live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Northeast Portland. He dedicated it “to Portland and all the maniacs I grew up with there.”

An only child of two teachers, Braunger recalls skateboarding around town with friends while listening to preprogrammed loop tracks on an electronic keyboard. “It drove people nuts, and I think that was one part of why we would do it,” he says.

On the “Late Show with David Letterman” in 2008, Braunger referred to the city’s population in the 1980s as “hippies and murderous lumberjacks.”

He recalled prank-calling the two people with the funniest names in Portland’s phone book. One, called Skeletor P-Funk, played his bass into the phone instead of answering. The other had the funniest name Braunger has ever heard: Eggley Bagelface.

Portland was a “huge influence,” he says. “I definitely would not be me if I did not grow up there.”

‘Bye Mommy!’

Braunger’s childhood mischief echoes in his comedy today: His jokes have little pretension to the highbrow, instead tending toward the sublimely absurd. In one bit, he says he likes the Harry Potter books, but “they give our kids the wrong idea. Namely, that it’s OK to own an owl for a pet.”

Instead, he says, “owls are made of feathers, claws, beaks and hatred. That’s it.” He imitates how owls sound to him: “Hooo, hooo, hooo’s next to DIE?”

Another of Braunger’s favorite bits is from his time on the sketch-comedy show “Mad TV,” on which he acted in its final season in 2008-09. The sketch is a parody of weight-loss ads where actors pull their old, larger pants out to show how much they have lost. In the parody, the actors pull their pants down instead of out. “I’m still really proud” of the sketch, he says. “It’s utterly ridiculous.”

Braunger says he is not a “comedy elitist.” He enjoys “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and says “I will cry laughing at those montages of people falling down the stairs.”

This is not to say, though, that Braunger’s comedy lacks a deeper component. He speaks reverently of Richard Pryor, a favorite comedian. “He cursed all the time, but he kind of had that vulnerability,” Braunger says.

The way Pryor “laid bare” his deepest feelings while still being funny earns a particularly admiring title from Braunger: “The ultimate human.”

Like Pryor, Braunger opens up in his comedy. But, he says, “I don’t think I’m as fearless as him.” One story Braunger tells is of starting first grade, a time when “the world was made of love.”

Braunger’s mother put him on the elementary school bus for the first time, and he shouted “Bye, Mommy!” out the window. The whole bus laughed and mocked him, jeering “Bye, Mommy” back at him.

Young Matt was traumatized.

Now, he tells the story in his stand-up act: “(It) was incredibly painful, but now I find it hilarious.”

In another story, which he will feature in “Shovel Fighter,” a now grown-up Braunger has just finished singing karaoke, and a girl named Sarah comes to talk and flirt. “What my brain told my mouth to say,” Braunger recounts, “and my mouth decided, screw this guy, I hate him, too” was horrifying. He blurted out: “Where do you live?”

Picking up the chunks

Walking this line between humor and tragedy makes up a significant component of Braunger’s comedy, but he is most at home with his bread-and-butter, outrageous premises that do not get too personal. In his new-cast-member introduction on “Mad TV,” Braunger adopts an ironically hyper-masculine persona.

“I like to just pick up big chunks of things and just snap them in half in front of women,” he says.

An almost unbelievably ridiculous premise drawn out to the extreme is the heart of Braunger’s comedy, and he knows himself better than to stray from it.

So he doesn’t get political. Instead, he will keep doing comedy like the bit where he fantasizes about having a baby named “Rick” who would be “a baby with huge greasy mechanic hands, and, like, a mustache, just packing a box of Camels and staring at you.”

This style may not be the most erudite or emotionally revelatory stand-up. But one gets the feeling watching Braunger perform that he is a buddy, just joking around over beers.

Braunger’s stand-up is an honest, genuine reflection of the enormous toddler telling it, and for this, Richard Pryor would be proud.