Joe Klocek is a gifted joke-writer, but roughly half of his act comes from interacting directly with the audience. It’s something the San Francisco-based comedian stumbled upon when he first started doing stand-up more than a decade ago.

“I didn’t have enough material to fill the time,” said Klocek, performing at Wiley’s Comedy Niteclub on Friday and Saturday. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got 30 minutes.’ I had maybe 15 minutes, so I started talking to the audience. ‘What do you do for a living?’ It started with that, but now it’s actually fun. The crowd enjoys it. They walk out feeling like they got a tailor-made show. It’s never going to happen like that again.

“But my material is important to me,” he said. “There has to be some kind of a balance. It’s not like I’m sick of the stuff coming out of my mouth or I don’t want to say the jokes, but it’s nice to do a bit I want to do and then have the freedom to walk away from it and then come back to it. I think the crowd gets it. They understand they get to see the wheels spin in my head and that’s kind of cool, too.”

San Francisco has a rich comedy history, which Klocek didn’t realize until after he started doing stand-up. However, once immersed in the scene, the city’s brand of smart, sophisticated humor helped shape his comedy aesthetic.

“In San Francisco, there’s always this push to be unique, to dig deeper and find out what’s different about a topic,” Klocek said. “If you’re going to do a dating joke, it better be personal, it better be funny and it better reveal something more. Comics need constant input, and there’s a lot happening here, politically and socially. It’s cool because I get the benefit of that and then it comes out in my act.”