Comedian and actor Jim Breuer will perform at the Conference Center in Lake Placid on Friday, Dec. 13 (Provided photo)

LAKE PLACID — Former SNL cast member and acclaimed comedian Jim Breuer will finish a marathon tour of more than 150 cities in Lake Placid.

On and off stage, Breuer is known for speaking his mind — for example, two weeks out from performing at the Olympic Center, he admits he doesn’t like the Olympics.

“I’d rather watch turtles chasing one another,” Breuer said.

Even so, Breuer, who grew up on Long Island, came to the Adirondacks during summer breaks as a kid. When a connection through a friend brought the possibility of a gig in Lake Placid, he accepted gladly.

“It’s gonna be an interesting night because I know I don’t have anything after that,” Breuer said. “So I’m gonna let a lot loose that night.”

Breuer has been performing stand-up gigs since 1989. He has a presence across mediums and genres, hosting a weekly podcast called “Jim Breuer’s Breuniverse.” He is also an actor and producer, appearing in movies like the 1998 American stoner film, “Half-Baked,” and voicing characters in “Titan A.E.” (2000) and “Zookeeper” (2011).

When he walks onto any stage, Breuer said he’s never sure what’s going to happen. His sets are “extremely improvised,” although they do tend to revolve around a few topics that have shifted through different seasons of his life. There was a time, for example, when a lot of his material had to do with fatherhood and marriage. Now, with three adult kids who are (mostly) out of the house, he’s moved onto a new set of material.

“I only can speak on what I live and what I experience,” Breuer said. “I’m not a brilliant writer when I sit and I try to create things that don’t exist in my life, so most things that I put out there are extremely relatable.”

No topic is off-topic for Breuer and his irreverent approach to comedy leads him to talk about things other people might prefer to avoid, from faith to the question of whether it’s OK to get stoned with his adult kids. No matter what’s on his mind, he doesn’t adjust to what he thinks the audience wants to hear. He just speaks his mind.

This is perhaps even more true of the last three or four years, which in Breuer’s words, have been “intense.”

“It was intense on every level, for every genre, and I felt like I had a lot to say and a lot to find the funny in,” Breuer said.

Breuer himself is deeply skeptical of “experts” and said he instead likes to rely on common sense. During the years of the pandemic, he spoke forcefully against vaccine mandates and refused to perform in venues that required people to be vaccinated, a stance he said he still stands by. He is increasingly displeased by political polarization in the “media” and the priorities that he sees modern culture pursuing. He thinks this causes complex issues to be reduced to slogans.

“They’ve dehumanized all of us. Everyone’s dehumanized,” Breuer said. “When you take a subject like an abortion, and you make it a slogan, we’ve lost our souls.”

Breuer doesn’t equivocate when it comes to his opinions and sees comedy as an essential way to challenge the status quo. He said some people like to draw lines around what is appropriate to joke about. Breuer likes to cross them. He thinks laughing is one of the ways to push back against cultural norms and assumptions.

Ever since he was young, however, Breuer has also found comedy to be healing in times of loss and difficult seasons of life.

“The thing that got everyone through was laughing. Always find something to laugh about, especially your struggle,” Breuer said. “And to me, laughter and music are the beginning of all healing processes, because it means you’re humbled.”

Once he bows out at the end of this tour, Breuer is taking a break from touring and performing for a while. He said he’ll be writing scripts and “sell a TV show, or a film or two.” He’ll also be working on a documentary about his travels to Africa, a place he’s visited many times over the last few years. His travel is one of the things that has prompted him to interrogate the assumptions about the superiority of Western culture.

“We just say, ‘one nation under God.’ I always say, ‘Well, what is the god you’re defining?'” Breuer said. “Because all we do is promote sex, we promote popularity, we promote individualism, we promote vanity, we promote everything except morality and spirituality, which are the true essence of every human.”

Breuer will perform at Olympic Center Conference Center at 2634 Main Street at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 13. Tickets and more information at https://tinyurl.com/2dsh5pjz.