When he was 55, Max Wegerbauer struggled with depression.

“It was a big turning point in my life. It’s why I tell jokes,” he said Monday, sitting on a stool at Starbucks, where he works inside the Redmond Fred Meyer.

We’ll get to the jokes. First the bad news.

Back when he became depressed, Wegerbauer was not the popular Starbucks barista he is today, at 74, married, quick with a laugh and quicker with the wit. Back then, he endured a rotten six-week period during which he lost his job of 18 years, went through a move, and, already divorced, saw the demise of the relationship he was in.

“Now, Psychology Today will tell you those are the three most stressful things you can do, and I knew that,” says Wegerbauer, who sounds remarkably similar to the late comedian George Carlin when he speaks. “I said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll go through them all at once; get over it, then I don’t have to go through it three separate times.’

“But that didn’t work very well. I got severely depressed,” he says. “I mean, going from the point where you’re driving a sports car and can donate to a charity to having $400 in your pocket and no car, and that’s it? That was brutal. It was not a fun situation.”

The best medicine

Later, the disheartened Wegerbauer landed a job as a disc jockey at a small-town radio station in Porterville, Calif. He feared listeners would pick up on his state of mind.

“Along with all the other things, I was broke. I mean, really. I was flat busted, which had never happened before in my life. So I said, ‘I gotta do something.’ I had no money to go to a psychiatrist or a doctor or a counselor or anything.”

What he did was venture inside a used bookstore, where he bought three joke books for a dollar each.

“I’d go to the radio station early, and I’d read those joke books till I started to laugh. Then I’d get on the air, and I did fine,” he says. “Whoever said laughter is the best medicine was right.”

After pulling himself up from the depths in this manner, Wegerbauer told himself, “‘I have to pay back. … I’d always told stories and told jokes, but then I got serious.

“I said, ‘All right, the way I’m going to pay back, I’m going to, at every opportunity, try and bring a smile to people’s faces. So waiting in an elevator, waiting in line at the post office, at the bank, here at Starbucks, walking down the street — I’ll stop and I’ll tell somebody a joke.”

It’s true. After the interview, he called this reporter’s voice mail and left a joke about what happened to the cat who ate a bowl of yarn.

“It had mittens.”

Instead of having an all-time favorite joke, he cycles through them. His current favorite is “What do you call a sleepwalking nun?”

Give up?

“A roamin’ Catholic.”

Like a true pun master, he likes it when people groan. He prefers clean jokes, the cuter and cornier the better, he says. He has seven grandchildren, three of whom live in Redmond, and he gets some of the jokes he tells from them.

“Once a month they get a newsletter, and they have a page of jokes in there written by kids. So they’re one of my sources of material. One I got from them was, ‘When did cave people invent hockey?’

“ ‘During the Ice Age.’ ”

Another: “Why did Humpty Dumpty have such a great fall?

“He was making up for a lousy summer.”

Joke delivery

Wegerbauer says he continued telling jokes and working as a DJ for about a year and a half. Then a chance trip to Las Vegas turned out to be another watershed moment.

He called up some friends in Vegas, a couple who had invited them to stay at their place. Another friend lent him the use of his car, which he took to see yet another friend, who owned a computer company.

That friend offered Wegerbauer a job as a shipping and receiving clerk.

“I said, ‘You know, I didn’t think I’d get to Vegas, and I got to Vegas. I didn’t have any money, so I got a free ride. I didn’t have a place to stay; I got a free place to stay. I didn’t have any way to get around, and I got a free ride. I think God wants me here.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna go back, give two weeks’ notice, and I’m coming to Vegas.’ ”

Once situated at the computer company, he continued his joke-telling ways. “Nonstop. The delivery driver, everybody on the floor. I’d be at the craps table and I’d start telling jokes.”

A stand-up guy

It evolved to the point where he did stand-up comedy for two years while living in Las Vegas.

“I wasn’t very good. I went from terrible to not-so-terrible. I like to say that one of the reasons I wasn’t very successful in Las Vegas is I had the only clean act in town. But that’s not entirely true,” he says, chuckling. “I just wasn’t that good.”

Wegerbauer loved the people and the pay, opening for a hypnotist at the Bourbon Street Casino. He likes to talk and be in front of a crowd, and he likes being the center of attention, he says.

After working for his friend for six months, Wegerbauer decided to start his own business, selling printers and cartridges. By age 66, he began thinking about retiring, but first had to pay off his debts. For one period of time, he worked straight through on weekends, sometimes sleeping in his office, until one Monday when he realized he’d worked 49 days in a row.

He decided to take the day off and do something “to remind me that life is good.” He’d given up cigarette smoking when he was 32, but, 34 years later, went out and bought himself a cigar, “strictly to make myself feel good … because lighting up a cigar always made me feel like a million bucks,” he says.

Leaving Las Vegas

He eventually settled his debts and, five years ago, moved with his wife, Lorna, to Eugene, a place he’d visited as a young man and had always wanted to return to.

“But I’d never been there in the wintertime, so I didn’t know about the rain,” he says, laughing. They lasted a year, during which Wegerbauer mostly relaxed.

When they decided to move to Crooked River Ranch, he wanted to keep busy. He bought a chain saw and began cutting wood as a hobby and, along with Starbucks, has held down a number of part-time jobs, including one delivering pizzas.

Last October, he underwent bypass surgery, he says. He’d exercised some before his surgery, mostly walking.

“After the operation, I said, ‘If God is good enough to give me another 20 or 30 years, I better take care of this body.’ So I decided to jog instead of walk.”

He’s managed to lose 33 pounds, and in June, eight months to the day after his surgery, he ran a 5K race, coming in second in his age bracket.

“One of the things that happened when I was 55 was I figured out that you have to decide what your role in life is,” he says. “You have to figure out your purpose.”

Buying those joke books helped him find his. “I finally decided that one of my reasons for being here — and there might be more than one — is to try and make the world a better place at the level that I’m at.

“That’s why I did stand-up,” he says. However, he figures that if he were truly supposed to be funny in front of crowds, he would have had more success. “Maybe I’m just meant to do it on a one-to-one basis.”

Cup of jokes

Deborah Stubbs, who also works at Starbucks, says customers miss getting their joke fix when he’s not there to supply it.

Does she like his jokes?

“Until I’ve heard them a 50th time. Then I’m ready for a new one,” she says.

Rhonda Etnire, manager at Fred Meyer, says patrons eat up Wegerbauer’s corny sense of humor: “They love Max. He’s great with the customers.

“Even (for) us, it’s a pickup. We go over there to get our coffee, and Max tells us a joke. Even though we’re like, ‘Oh, Max,’ it makes our day.”

Etnire says she’s not as good at telling jokes as Wegerbauer. She tells one anyway.

“What did the hot dog say after it won the race?”

Pause.

“I’m a wiener!”

The joke, needless to say, is right up Wegerbauer’s alley, and he laughs heartily.

About his own humor, he says, “I just feel like what I’m doing is, I don’t know, making the world a little bit of a better place in a small, insignificant way.”

He’s not kidding around — at least not about that.