Tar: something like patch's -p

[Akim Demaille]

Hi!

I often bring tarballs at home which I expand in my working directory.
But I couldn't find any means to tell tar I want it to skip the first
dir.  So I have to

  tar jxvf autoconf-2.52e.tar.bz2
  cp -r autoconf-2.52e/* ~/src/ace
  rm -rf autoconf-2.52e

while I'd like to

  cd ~/src/ace
  tar -p1 jxvf autoconf-2.52e.tar.bz2

Is there any such option?  Or any better scheme to handle this?