It only took 73 years for comedian Andy Huggins to become an overnight sensation.

The bespectacled 75-year-old, with his gray hair and mustache, looks more like a favorite grandfather than a standup comedian whose one-liners on TikTok and YouTube have brought him fame and financial security.

Huggins will be on stage at Off the Hook Comedy Club in Naples on October 14-16.

The turning point of Huggins’ career came in 2022, when he did a comedy special, “Early Bird Special” that his manager sold to independent production company Comedy Dynamics, which then made it available to Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Sirius Radio and others.

“Comedy Dynamics said, ‘Hop on, join Instagram, join TikTok, we’ll send your reel. You post those reels, and it’ll draw attention to the special,’” Huggins said.

His one-liners, many of his jokes geared toward growing old, were perfect for social media, he said.

“I love doing one-liners, I’ve never tried any other approach. There’s no reason to,” he said.

Huggins never wanted to be anything but a standup comedian. The only other job he had was as a desk clerk in a Charlottesville, Virginia, hotel.

He was about 19 when he was in a theater watching the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup and started observing the crowd.

“I kind of stepped back in my mind from watching the film and I listened to the laughter,” he said. “I just loved it, and it was just so wonderful, and I thought, ‘You know, I want to be on the other side of that laughter one day.’ That was the goal.”

Virginia had few comedy clubs in the 1970s; he knew he would have to move elsewhere to reach his goal. He worked on his act in Los Angeles for several years, but moved to Houston in 1981, where he had some comedian friends and less competition for stage time. He paid the rent by playing the clubs around Houston and the comedy club circuit around the country.

By the time he turned 60 and thought his career was going nowhere, he figured he would do as many club dates as he could to make enough money to pay the rent. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Huggins noticed around age 50 he started getting literature from AARP and he was getting senior citizen discounts without being asked his age. He didn’t think of himself as old, but his audiences in their 20s and 30s did.

“At first it was just a matter of leaning in to how I was perceived by the audience,” he said, “but at some point, you know, I’m old by any definition — so I started to head in that direction, and maybe around the age of 60 it picked up steam.”

Huggins is a joke-writing machine; he needs to be to fill a 45-minute set.

“Last Monday, I tried out a couple of new jokes, and they worked, and I was real pleased with myself. Then I realized: ‘OK, that’s only 30 seconds of my act,’” he said. “It’s difficult, the comedy is difficult, and the writing is the most difficult part.”

He will sit down with a legal pad, find a topic that interests him and see what he can find funny about it. Rarely does a joke occur to him fully formed. He might tell four jokes per minute, which comes out to 180 per show. Only one out of every four he writes is good enough to use, so for a 45-minute set, that’s 720 jokes.

Huggins’ recent success hasn’t changed him much. He’s a recovering alcoholic 37 years sober, who doesn’t have a wife or children to take care of. He lives a “low-maintenance lifestyle.”

“What this does is what it does for anybody that has a couple of extra bucks in the bank. It has changed because now I can relax with a lot of things financially,” he said.

One thing that he can’t relax about is traveling; he hates it.

“I don’t like it. It’s a very stressful part of my life, but what are you gonna do? I’m blessed. I’m so blessed [that] to whine about travel is to be so ungrateful, so I really shouldn’t.”

IF YOU GO:

Andy Huggins

Off the Hook Comedy Club, 2500 Vanderbilt Beach Road

7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, Wednesday, Oct. 15,  Thursday, Oct. 16