Pardon if you’ve heard this one before: A man steps before the judges of the NBC competition series “America’s Got Talent” wearing medical scrubs and carrying a doctor’s bag.
That may sound like the opening line of a (very) situational joke, but for North Hills resident Bob Baker, who considers himself “America’s Funniest Gastroenterologist,” that scenario played itself out on national television last Wednesday.
The rest of the joke goes like this: Baker, 61, is instantly recognized by “America’s Got Talent” judge Howard Stern, who exclaims that Baker is not only his personal doctor and friend for more than 25 years, but has also performed a colonoscopy on the “King of All Media.”
Baker reaches into his doctor’s kit, and to the astonishment of the rest of the panel, which includes comedian Howie Mandel, supermodel Heidi Klum and former Spice Girl Mel B, pulls out a puppet in the likeness of a giant colon and proceeds to hold a conversation about, well, all the things a colon does as part of the human body.
The act subsides and the judges give their opinions: Stern recuses himself from voting because of their friendship, Mandel says he doesn’t see it as a “million-dollar act,” and Mel B. doesn’t get it. Klum simply says, “I’m sorry.”
Baker is eliminated from the competition, but Stern gives his doctor a parting one-liner.
“Bob, please don’t take this out on me,” Stern said. “You’re the only one I trust to do that kind of probing.”
By day, Baker is a physician at North Shore Internal Medicine Associates, PC, based in Great Neck, which joined the North Shore-LIJ Health System last year.
But a few times each month, Baker gets up in front of an audience, shedding his medical bag in favor of a wacky cast of characters that allow him to act and speak in ways he typically wouldn’t in everyday life.
“They always say to performers, ‘When you’re on stage, be yourself,’” Baker said. “As a ventriloquist, you have to be something bigger. We all show different aspects of ourselves to different people, and we have aspects to our personalities we don’t really show anyone. The characters tend to emerge out of that.”
There’s the cheeky blonde boy Oscar Makyne, the first professional model Baker ever used in his act, who is always armed with a crude one-liner and aids in the “tape-over-mouth” trick in which Baker throws his voice with his lips taped together.
There’s Zoltan, brother of Zoltar the Fortune Teller from the movie “Big,” who struggles to read the fortunes and minds of Baker’s audience, often berating the comedian as a result.
There’s Mrs. Lucille Goldman, a so-called “fan favorite” with whom Baker closes his performances, who flirts with male – and often married – audience members in hopes of a good time after the show.
But perhaps the most unique of the bunch is Sigmoid Colon, the character Baker used on “America’s Got Talent,” a model of a large intestine who serves as the bridge between Baker’s two careers.
“I imagined him as a guy who’s very dissatisfied with his position in life,” Baker said. “I mean, he’s a large intestine, [the personality is] pretty obvious if you think about what the large intestine does.”
Baker said he enjoyed puppets and puppeteering as a young boy, but it wasn’t until age 9, when his mother sat him in front of the family’s television, that his interest in ventriloquism took hold.
“It was puppets, but not puppets,” Bennett said. “It was ventriloquism, Terry Bennett [performing]. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”
From that day forward, Baker devoted himself to studying the art of ventriloquism, watching legends like Paul Winchell, Jimmy Nelson and Edgar Bergen, who was also known among the first to take his characters and their voices to the radio
Baker started performing his own ventriloquist act at birthday parties through his teens and early 20s as a means of making extra cash through his undergraduate years at Princeton University and medical school at Columbia University, though his performances became less frequent as his medical career took off.
By 2008, Baker was barely performing at all, “at family gatherings here and there or if people knew I had done it before and asked me,” he said.
But a question nagged at him from the back of his mind, a question Baker said he had to answer for himself.
“I asked myself, ‘Am I good enough to do this for people who don’t know me?’” Baker said. “When people know you, they give you the benefit of the doubt and think you’re great, but when people don’t know you, you’ll get the benefit of the doubt for about 30 seconds and they’ll let you know.”
Baker enrolled at the Comedy College course at Governor’s Comedy Club in Levittown, studying under comedienne Carie Karavas, who Baker said helped get the most out of his characters.
When the program’s “graduation show” came around, Baker found the answer he was seeking, as his act attracted the interest of the Manhattan venue Caroline’s on Broadway, a Comedy Central-certified comedy club, who booked him for a show.
“That’s when I really knew I was funny,” Baker said.
Baker performs mostly in Manhattan and on Long Island, with a monthly show at Nick and Pedro’s Restaurant in Manhasset, and donates his performance fee to various charities, namely Autism Speaks. He also sells stuffed animals of Sigmoid Colon at shows and on his Web site, BobBakerComedy.com, and donates the proceeds toward colon cancer research.
Baker auditioned for “America’s Got Talent” after Stern got him tickets last year. After sending a tape of a performance with Sigmoid last Stepember, Baker was called back for auditions with producers and executive producers before advancing to a date with the judges during a live taping at Hammerstein Ballroom in April.
Prior to his audition, Baker said Stern told producers about a possible conflict of interest and the ventriloquist was eliminated from the competition, whose winner is awarded a $1 million prize, even before stepping on stage.
“They asked me if I wanted to audition anyway, and I said sure,” Baker said. “I didn’t really care about winning anyway. I wanted to get up and have some fun.”
Baker said the crowd enjoyed the performance, chanting “Vegas!” to coax the judges into voting for him to advance to the next round of competition in Las Vegas.
But Baker said the judge’s opinions were edited differently for the version of the audition that made Wednesday’s episode. Mandel still voted against him, but Klum was supportive, and there was still a chance Mel B. would have allowed him to advance in the contest.
“Just before Mel B. was about to speak, a producer ran up to the judge’s table, covered Mel B.’s microphone and whispered something to her, and that’s when she went into everything about how it wasn’t funny and that she didn’t get it,” Baker said. “And then when they put it on TV, all you saw of Heidi was her saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and it looked like I was horrible.”
Baker said the crowd connected with his performance as Sigmoid, and the experience, as well as his return to the stage, is satisfaction enough.
“The audience doesn’t want someone who’s just like them, they want something a bit extreme,” Baker said. “It’s fun because I can seem aghast by what the character is saying, and it works.”
