Margaret Smith’s Dry Wit ‘Marinating’ for Laff Stop

Comedian Margaret Smith--she of the distinctively slow, deadpan delivery--just got back from a week of engagements in Hawaii where she went scuba diving for the first time.

Before submerging, Smith says, the diving instructor told her: “Now the idea, when you’re down there, is to just do everything real slow.”

“I’m like, No problem,” says Smith. “I’m slow up here. . . . I’m sure I’ll be slow down there.”

Smith will bring her dry wit and measured style of delivery to the Laff Stop in Newport Beach on Thursday for two shows.

By then she may have worked her Hawaiian scuba-diving experience into her act.

“It’s marinating now,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles last week. “It’s like certain things have to sit with you for a while.”

Called “the Nurse Ratched of stand-up” by one critic, Smith has a comedy style that has been described as caustic and droll--her slow, careful delivery labeled laconic and morose.

But don’t say she lacks energy on stage.

“I’m bothered when somebody calls me low energy because I think I’m just a different kind of energy.” A pause. “I think I’m like nuclear energy. You don’t see it, but you know it’s there.”

Another pause, then: “I don’t know, I believe in pauses. . . . I mean jazz wouldn’t be jazz if it weren’t for the great pauses.”

Smith, whose TV credits include “Late Night With David Letterman” and “A&E;’s Evening at the Improv” once unnerved “Good Morning America” host Joan Lunden during an interview because she didn’t answer Lunden’s questions quickly enough.

“You know,” Smith says, “this occurred to me in Hawaii because it was so peaceful there and I got to unwind: I think there are opportunities I don’t get because people are afraid of my rhythm. . . . I don’t know, I’m 35 years old, I think to myself, I’m a subtle person.”

Smith describes her comedy style by saying, “I kind of have a next-door neighbor approach. It’s almost like I’m out in the back yard by the picket fence hanging clothes and I’m talking to you. But the content is that of someone that you might be afraid to bring home to mom.”

She grew up in a blue-collar section of Chicago, the kind of place “where the guys don’t wear shorts because only pansies wear shorts, and you work hard all week and earn the right to be in a bar all weekend.”

Smith, who studied improvisation at Second City before moving to New York in the early ‘80s, draws from her adolescence.

“I wrote this poem when I was 15,” she says on stage, “and it goes like this: ‘I am the sea. You are the river. You run to me. I take you in. I hate my parents.’ ”

Here she is complaining that her parents let her sister take piano lessons simply because she was fat: “Like the world needs another fat piano player.”

Although she describes her own childhood as “typical,” Smith says of her act: “I think everything is based on something true, but I might color it a little.”

Smith, who has a bit part in “GoodFellas” with Robert DeNiro, is writing a short film of her own. She is also collaborating with an artist friend on a comic book.

But she has another ambition. When she was trying to break into comedy in New York, she worked as a cook--”and a good cook,” she says. She still loves to cook. “And I still fantasize about opening a restaurant. I’d call it Eat Your Vegetables. And you wouldn’t be able to get your dessert unless you ate them.”

She paused, then laughed and said: “Kind of a mean restaurant.”