North Providence native Ace Aceto has a variety of professions. He’s an author, podcaster, live show producer, an actor and a voiceover artist. And now, add stand-up comedy. As part of a show called “Wise Guys of Comedy” happening on January 31 at the Park Theatre in Cranston, he’s going to be taking the stage with impressions and jokes. The show starts at 8pm and fellow comics Frank Santorelli and Brad Mastrangelo will be performing as well.

Aceto and I recently had a talk about how he started doing celebrity imitations, podcasting and being an author and his thoughts on being part of the upcoming show.

Rob Duguay: You’ve been imitating celebrities since you were a kid. Who was the first celebrity you remember imitating?

Ace Aceto: I started doing cartoon voices, so it was a lot of Bugs Bunny and stuff like that. When I was seven or eight, I tried impersonating Roseanne Roseannadanna (from Saturday Night Live) in a really, really bad way. The time I started getting impressions down was when I was watching cartoons. Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck were the first two cartoons I was able to kind of nail down where I started thinking, “Hey, I really sound like this.”

RD: Who is your favorite celebrity imitation to do these days as part of your set?

AA: It goes back and forth, my co-host on my podcast basically says that his favorite ones that I do, and they are my favorite, are Gilbert Gottfried, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, and Family Guy characters.

RD: That makes sense, especially for Rhode Island. This podcast you just mentioned is “Behind The Funny” with Scott Higgins. What initially made you want to start doing a podcast and what are your thoughts on podcasting’s current widespread role in comedy?

AA: Scott was always a fan of “Inside the Actors Studio” with James Lipton. He liked the fact that he would dive deeply with the actor on what their experience was, how they started and if they went to acting school. Scott wanted to do that with comics, so he started out with ones around Rhode Island, and then it expanded. I was on the fifth episode of the podcast, and it was just a one-on-one interview. We had been friends already, but we just liked the way we kind of clicked, which made the conversation easy.

A few weeks later, I said to him, hey, how would you like to turn the tables and have someone interview you? Let me interview you about your career so your audience can learn a little bit more about you. Again, we had a great rapport and I said to him, if you ever want a co-host, let me know because this was kind of fun. Not long afterwards, Scott reached out to me. For him, he found while going back and listening to older episodes that there were some pauses in the conversation that he was having to edit out. It was mainly because he was in the middle of a guest’s answer and he was kind of busy adjusting the sound volume and things like that.

He felt like with these pauses that if he had a co-host then those pauses could be filled in. That’s how it started, I weaseled my way into being the co-host, but we love it. We’ve been doing it for a while now, this March we’ll be going into our ninth season.

RD: Very cool. You also wrote a book a couple years ago called “Maddie Loses A Tooth”, and it’s about your youngest daughter Maddie who lost one of her front teeth.

AA: Maddie lost one of her front teeth, and for some reason, she had a million questions about the Tooth Fairy that night. I just kept saying to her “I don’t know the answer to that question, you’d have to ask them.” She then asked me if we had any index cards. She disappeared to her room with markers and wrote up 18 different questions for the Tooth Fairy to answer that night. I laid out the cards on my bed, took a picture of it and in a smart aleck kind of way, I posted it on Facebook saying “Great, the Tooth Fairy is going to be up all night answering these questions.” I don’t even remember who it was, but I remember someone suggesting that it would make a cute children’s book.

I did a little bit of research on the ages that kids lose their teeth, what words are best that they can comprehend and how long a book for that age group should be. I then wrote down a first draft, whittled it down, edited it and let people read it. I had done a lot of reading about publishers and big publishing companies and I came to the realization that unless you have a literary agent that can get your book in front of Random House or any of the large publishers, self-publishing is the way to go. I worked with Stillwater Books, which at the time was in Pawtucket but now they’re in West Warwick, and they kind of help with self-publishing. When it came time to get an illustrator, a good friend of mine Carla Mulhern, who I’ve known since college, said that her son Jonathan could probably illustrate this book.

I had seen his work before and he’s a very, very talented artist. That’s how Jonathan became my illustrator.

RD: You got this “Wise Guys of Comedy” show coming up at The Park Theatre, so what are your thoughts about it? I know that you produce your own comedy show called the “Royal Flush Comedy Show”, so does going in with that experience give you a different perspective?

AA: My “Royal Flush Comedy Show” came about between 12 and 15 years ago as just an idea that I had. At the time I started it, it seemed like everybody was trying to have some sort of themed show. I used my name to come up with this whole Royal Flush concept and I still do it at different places, but I’ve been taking a step back from the producing, although this year I’m looking at a few new venues that I’d like to do it in. When I was approached by the folks who do the Newport Comedy Series, who work closely with Spectacle Live, they were asked if I was interested in being part of this Italian-themed show. I said that I thought I’d be a good fit for it because I do a lot of material about growing up Italian, going to Catholic school and a lot of things that Italians, especially in Rhode Island, have gone through.

I’m looking forward to working with other comics I respect very much in Frank Santorelli and Brad Mastrangelo. I think it’s going to be a really fun night and I think for any Italian-American they’re really going to enjoy the show.