OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one. A state trooper walks into a comedy club….

Well, actually, this isn’t a joke, it’s a true story. Dwayne Gill, who has served as a Michigan State Police trooper / sergeant for 17 years — and spent several years on the security details for both Governor John Engler and Governor Jennifer Granholm — is also a stand-up comic.

And he actually got his start in Ann Arbor, back when he was an Ann Arbor police officer. And on Thursday, he comes back to the stage where he did his first-ever gig: the Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase (which, back in the day, was still known as the Main Street.)

And Gill says that Thursday’s show will likely be his last club gig for a while. He plans on doing more corporate comedy gigs, because he recently took on a new, more time-consuming position with the State Police. He is now the State Police’s liason to the Michigan State Legislature — essentially, he’ll be functioning as a lobbyist for State Police interests

“Yeah, it will be a more time-intensive job, so I will have to cut down on the number of comedy gigs I do, which is why the corporate bookings appeal to me more — they pay more, so I don’t have to do as many of them to make the same amount of money I would make in clubs,” says Gill.

The Detroit native spent two years, from ’91-’93, with the Ann Arbor police. During that period, he made a decision.

“A lot of times, when you’re a cop, you see a lot of the bad things that go on in life, and a lot of cops end up only hanging around other cops when they’re off duty, and all their friends are cops, and I didn’t want to be that guy,” says Gill. “I wanted to find a hobby or activity for my off hours that was totally removed from police work.

“And I’d always been funny — I was the class clown in school, liked to play practical jokes, and I spent a lot of time listening to guys like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, and watching ‘Make Me Laugh.’”

So, Gill got up on stage at the Showcase in 1992, and continued to do comedy for three years. He joined the State Police in 1993.

“Then, one night in ’95, I crashed and burned at a show — I just wasn’t funny. And I realized that I didn’t really know technique, or know a lot of the history of comedy. So, I quit, for seven years.”

Then, in 2002, Gill went to New York, enrolled in a class at the American Comedy Institute, learned about technique and timing, and read a few books, and got back on the horse. “Right away, I was getting laughs, because I learned some craft,” says Gill.

Gill released his first comedy CD, “Inappropriately Funny,” in 2009 and plans to release another one in 2011. Gill’s material is a mix of “one-third cop jokes, one-third relationship jokes and one-third topical material,” he says.

And even though he’s a police officer, he doesn’t shy away from some of the edgier material than is commonplace among club comics — like riffing on racial stereotypes, for example.

One of the jokes on the CD was about cold Michigan winters, and that “us black folks don’t like to go snowmobiling — because we’d have to sit up straight….Plus, there’s no place for us to hide our guns.”

He also cracked, “I went to private school as a kid — that’s why I talk like this” —- a riff on the urban dialects used by many inner-city African-Americans — a dialect that Gill does not use when he speaks.

He also throws a few barbs in the direction of ex-Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the extramarital affair that ultimately led to his resignation and conviction for lying under oath. Onstage, Gill jokingly wonders why Kilpatrick “wanted to have sex with a woman who looked like Scottie Pippin.”

Gill also does some acting, and is slated to be featured in the Dec. 28 episode of “Detroit 1-8-7.” He will make his movie debut next year in the movie “Crave,” which stars Ron Perlman. He’s also been a guest on the nationally syndicated “Bob and Tom” radio show

Gill uses very little profanity in his act, and frequently substitutes “freakin’” for the more commonly used real-deal alternative.

“When I was starting out, Roger Feeny at the Showcase gave me some advice — he said that ‘clean leads to green’” — that is, that by toning down the profanity, a comic can book a wider range of gigs beyond the club circuit, and therefore earn more money.

“Plus, I think it’s more challenging to write a ‘clean’ joke,” says Gill. “A lot of people can write a dirty joke; I think it takes talent to write a clean joke that is just as funny.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music and comedy for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.