Hold the nutty professor jokes to a minimum, please: Tom Shadyac, millionaire director of “The Nutty Professor” with Eddie Murphy, “Liar Liar” with Jim Carrey and “Patch Adams” with Robin Williams, has put his movie career on hold and given up his Hollywood mansion to be a New Age sage, live in a Malibu trailer park and travel weekly to the University of Memphis to teach classes about storytelling.

He’s a bike-riding, long-haired vegan on a barbecue-eating commuter campus, a surfer trying to make waves as a self-described “fairly radical cat” in an often conservative town.

Instead of grades and tests, he gives his students pizzas, protein bars and — at the end of each semester — free bicycles. The students, meanwhile, share powerful, emotional stories about suicide attempts, “paralyzing anxiety” and absentee fathers during three-hour classes in the U of M Theatre Building that are part movie analysis (“The Truman Show” was screened this week), part group therapy session.

“We are asking the questions that you ultimately have to answer, and not just in his class but for the rest of your life,” Shadyac says.

When a student brings Hinduism into the discussion, Shadyac interrupts: “Don’t go too deep now. We’ve all had pizza.” The joke is a reminder that Shadyac began his show business career as a Bob Hope gag writer, a decade before he began a run as the director of seven feature films that grossed close to $2 billion, from “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” in 1994 to “Evan Almighty” in 2007.

If you’re not a movie fan yet you recognize Shadyac’s surname, you may understand why the comedy veteran has embraced Memphis.

Shadyac, 55, is the younger brother of Richard Shadyac Jr., 56, the CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The men are the sons of former ALSAC chief Richard Shadyac Sr., who died in 2009 at 80. The Shadyac boys grew up in Falls Church, Va., where they sometimes went door to door to collect donations for St. Jude. They visited Memphis often with their father, but Tom’s trips became much more frequent after his brother became the first ALSAC CEO to live in Memphis.

“As you spend more time in this city, you fall in love with it,” Richard Shadyac says. “Tom was spending more and more time here, and looking for a way to make an impact.”

A lawyer, Richard Shadyac is businesslike in dress and grooming. Tom Shadyac is less conventional in appearance as well as in lifestyle. Trim and fit, he typically wears jeans, sneakers with colorful laces and longsleeve pullover shirts. (The shirt he wore to class this past Wednesday featured a breast-pocket patch with a picture of Gandhi and the caption: “Follow Your Heart.”) His wire-rim eyeglasses are perched on a thin face framed within curtains of curling, graying hair that fall past his shoulders.

“My culture wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer, but I was this guy,” he told his students Wednesday night. “I was an artist. I was a freak. I was Jesus meets Kenny G.”

The jokes, the loose demeanor and the Hollywood success enable Shadyac to reach — and impress — audiences across generation, education and income gaps.

“What I love about Memphis is, you are a city in need,” Shadyac told a dining room packed with business people during a January meeting of the Lipscomb Pitts Breakfast Club at the Memphis Botanic Garden. “This town is not asleep, it is in need. You can’t hide the problems.”

The talk was an example of Shadyac’s increasing public profile in town. He’s so eager to spread his new anti-materialistic philosophy, he doesn’t like to say no to speaking engagements.

His main impact here, however, is as a teacher in the U of M College of Communication, where, for the second semester in a row, he is conducting a course titled “Storytelling and Life.” The class is more or less a continuation of a course Shadyac taught for several years at Pepperdine University near Los Angeles.

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