COMEDY REVIEW : Is There a Comic in the House? Not at the Laff Stop

In the forthcoming film “Punchline,” Tom Hanks plays a student who turns his back on medicine to pursue a career as a stand-up comic.

Dr. Bill Miller would do well to reverse that plot: A comedian and part-time emergency room physician, he probably should go full time with medicine and leave comedy behind.

We haven’t seen him practicing medicine, but we have seen him performing comedy--most recently on Wednesday at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach--and he must be a better doctor.

True, it probably was no treat to follow impressive puppeteer Dan Horn (who elicited a standing ovation, rather unprecedented for a middle act). But even if Miller had followed a weak middle, he would have been a weak headliner.

His material is marginal. Though he’s likable and engaging, his delivery is average. He has no distinctive persona or point of view--beyond merely trading on the fact that he’s an MD.

And Miller established his credentials as a hack much quicker than he established those as a doc. In his opening joke, he mentioned that he had driven from the San Fernando Valley, noting that “they ought to change those signs on the 405 freeway from ‘Slower Traffic Keep Right’ to ‘No Mexicans in The Left Lane.’ ”

Then he actually said, “I’m not trying to offend anybody” before extending that and other racial stereotypes. Among his observations: “The worst combination of car and driver in the world is a Japanese woman behind the wheel of a Cutlass.” And he managed to pull the bit to an even lower level by acting out a Japanese person, complete with the ever-clever switching of Ls for Rs.

After some other sub-generic stuff on airplanes and flying, he moved into medical material: “You know that expression, ‘Four out of five doctors recommend’? I’m the fifth doctor.”

Rim shot.

And away he went. Instead of constructing truly funny bits out of his professional experience--the way, say, Cathy Ladman does from her school teaching days, or Al Lubel does from his days as an attorney--Miller often was content to simply relate exaggerated versions of med-school high jinks or of freakish things he’s encountered in the emergency room, tales of assorted pranks with cadavers or of having to extract various objects from a certain body cavity.

Occasionally, he hit on something mildly amusing, like the story of the man who went to the doctor about his back pain. After examining the man, the physician rendered a diagnosis in impenetrable medical gobbledygook.

Puzzled, the patient says, “Come on, doc. What does that really mean?”

“Well, it means a vacation for me.”

That’s about as good as it got. Moments later came a comment to an audience member that was more representative of the level at which Miller operates. When a guy stood up and started heading toward the restroom, Miller said: “Say, man, maybe it’s gas.”

Miller redeemed himself slightly when the guy returned and they chatted for a moment; he told Miller he was a waiter, but then said he worked at Neiman-Marcus. “Wait. Isn’t that a clothes store?--’Hi, can I bring you a corduroy.?’ ”

But then, at another point, he turned his attention to Zomax, noting that the popular painkiller had been taken off the market after some patient deaths: “Fifteen million people took this drug, and five died--(bleep) ‘em.”

For a licensed physician, that sounds less like obeying the Hippocratic oath than observing a hypocritical one. By the end of his 40-minute set, one couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d all be better served if Miller renewed his Hippocratic oath, plunged wholeheartedly into medicine and only entered comedy clubs as a patron.

Miller and Horn continue through Sunday at the Laff Stop.

The Laff Stop is at 2122 S.E. Bristol St., Newport Beach. Show times: 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. Friday, 8, 10 and 11:45 p.m. Saturday and 8:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $6-$8. Information: (714) 852-8762.