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“I have a warped mind,” San Mateo resident Lauren Mayer replies when asked to describe how she wrote some of the biting lyrics on “Latkes, Schmatkes!,” her new CD of original comedy songs for Chanukah. “My mind just goes there.”

And “there” could be anywhere. Absolutely anywhere.

One song, sung in Cuban cha-cha style, predicts that your friends will give you a dreidel-shaped potholder, because “you’re their favorite token Jew, or the only Jewish person they knew.”

Another song, sung in rap style purportedly by Dr. Dreidel (it’s Mayer, actually), proclaims “Eight is better than wuh-one, Chanukah is more fuh-un.”

And in the klezmer-sounding title track, Mayer sings about making latkes: “Oil on the ceiling, oil on the wall, all around the stove and sink, and even down the hall.” And the payoff for all that work? “They still look and taste,” she sings, “like deep-fried dirt.”

If there’s an overriding theme to the 12-track CD, it’s how Jews feel about getting buried by a Yuletide avalanche every year. Songs such as “Don’t They Know (Not Everyone Does Christmas)?” and “The Jew-in-the-Gentile-World Blues” get the point across with humor, some subtle, some biting.

It’s no surprise that Mayer, a 53-year-old married mother of two teenagers, grew up listening to “The Dr. Demento Show,” a syndicated radio show that crested in popularity in the late 1970s. The weekly broadcast included comedy songs, parodies and novelty records, and helped launch the careers of “Weird Al” Yankovic and others.

Mayer sent Dr. Demento, who is still doing his show via podcast, a copy of “Latkes, Schmatkes!” and received word via her publicist that “he loved it” and was going to play parts of it during his December holiday specials.

“I’ve never done any comedy that is this edgy or in your face, but I think all great comedians come from a place of a little bit of anger,” says Mayer, a Yale graduate who went on to become a cabaret writer and performer in San Francisco for many years. “My hope is that Jews will listen to this and laugh instead of pound their heads against the wall during Christmastime.”

Mayer crafted each song on the CD in a different musical style. “Down Home Country Chanukah” is a bluegrass/country tune. “I Hate Holiday Music” sounds just like a cheesy, jingle-bell-laden Christmas song. Other styles include Calypso and gospel.

First and foremost, Mayer says, all of the songs are “just fun,” marked by off-the-wall lyrics, creative rhymes and occasional inflections of Yiddish and Brooklyn accents. They are breezy, too, as nearly all of them are less than three minutes.

Mayer dedicated the CD to her father, who was diagnosed with brain cancer last year. As the CD went to press two months ago, doctors were giving him only two to four weeks to live, but he is still alive and diving — skydiving, that is, which he tried for the first time in October.

“I completely get my sense of humor from him,” Mayer says, noting that he opened her eyes (and ears) to comedy pioneers such as early TV star Ernie Kovacs and 1950s and ’60s novelty records stars such as Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones and Alan Sherman.

Mayer grew up in Irvine and had a bat mitzvah there in 1971, kind of a rarity for girls at that time. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, she went to New York City, but with “rats in my apartment, getting my wallet stolen, and flashers on the subway, I figured if I was going to be a struggling songwriter and singer, I should go somewhere that was a bit nicer.”

She became a mainstay of the then-popular 1980s cabaret scene in San Francisco, which included a mix of piano bars and flamboyant, drag-show productions. She nabbed three straight wins (for directing and writing) in a local, cabaret version of the Tony Awards.

After 1989, she turned to a more sedate career as a corporate entertainer, voice coach, and director and writer of children’s musicals. She also has some other CDs on the market, including “Psycho Super Mom” and “Return of Psycho Super Mom.”

Many of her recent gigs have included jobs for and within the Jewish community, such as writing a Purim play and also some songs for a Chanukah choir. She and her family — including sons David, 18, and Ben, 15, who sang and played drums on the CD and helped her produce a video for “Eight Is Better Than One” (now on YouTube) — are members of Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo. Scott Grinthal, “Husband 2.0” she calls him, is a big-band singer and also the cantor at St. Agnes Catholic Church in San Francisco. Yes, that is his official title, not musical director, but cantor.

“My parents said, ‘Lauren married a cantor! How wonderful!’” Mayer jokes. “I had to explain it’s not what they thought.”

The genesis for “Latkes, Schmatkes!” occurred last year, when National Public Radio played Mayer’s recording “The Fruitcake that Ate New Jersey” (a slight takeoff on the old Dr. Demento favorite “The Cockroach that Ate Cincinnati”) as an example of a bad holiday song. During an ensuing interview, Mayer suggested that maybe she should write a funny Chanukah album, which NPR host Liane Hansen thought was a great idea.

So Mayer set off on a whirlwind 10 months of writing, editing and recording.

Mayer says she’d often “crack up out loud” when writing the songs. Now she hopes people will have them same reaction when listening to them.

“Latkes, Schmatkes!” Information and music samples at www.laurenmayer.com. $15.99. Also available at iTunes, Amazon and other sites. $9.99 to download.