Carrot Top. Some laugh with him. Some. Still, as far as the numbers go, Carrot Top is veritable Vegas royalty. His brand of prop-display and gag may not exactly be cutting-edge, but it pulls in enough money to keep going, for better or worse, forever. Indeed, many think of Carrot Top’s as (help us) “the face” conjured; the type of comedy that naturally bubbles up from the sands of the desert. Same thing for those “musical-comedy” acts—you know, the shtick-meisters with wigs and lame impressions doing the rehashed hackery forged from a million bad lounge acts before them.
And while there are many hard-working comedy folks who have cut their teeth in places other than Vegas and relocated here because of decent crowds (and contracts), are any of them really doing more than rote recitation of surefire hits designed not to offend, challenge or surprise? Then again, maybe people in Las Vegas don’t want to hear anything much more than jokes about gambling, buffets and Montecore (in the voice of Jack Nicholson, no doubt).
Long has the self-styled “entertainment capital of the world” been trying to bring the funny. From the start of the modern casino era, comedians were part of the woodwork, but the bottom line was always the bottom line. Get the tourists into the joint, entertain them just enough, then back out to the money-making of the tables. Slowly but surely, as the hotels became more corporate, the humor became more controlled. Any chance of the legendary spontaneity of lounge lions like Shecky Greene and Don Rickles (fellows who would purportedly riff into dawn) was gone.
Big names of funny will always make the marquee, but what about the organic wit for the hometown crowd? Why is it that Las Vegas is the only city of its size without an independent comedy club? Oh sure, many hotels have rooms with a tight format of touring (and every so never local) comics, but it’s back to the hack well for most of these journeymen ... even the ones who are really great elsewhere.
When announcing the arrival of Spamalot, Steve Wynn told a reporter that he was behind the project because “one of the things I’ve missed in Las Vegas is wit.” You know Spamalot, the English comedy about King Arthur that was originally the toast of New York City. (FYI: It’s more amusing if you say “New York City” like a cowpoke around a campfire checking out where the salsa was from.) What does Wynn mean by “wit”? Certainly, there are witty folks struggling away in the mines of open-mic nights in bars around the Valley. True, many of these (mostly) guys are more focused on getting that five good minutes they’re sure they’re just short of to get onto HBO or Comedy Central. And then again, with their steady diet of misogyny, homophobia and pot-as-punchline jokes, maybe they aren’t the knights of Camelot (um, Excalibur), either.
Of course the best targets for wit are the power brokers like (but not specifically or in any legally libelous way) Wynn. I don’t see Carrot Top, or the local comics, touching those guys with a 10-foot pole. Hey, if Mark Twain did it over a hundred years ago in Virginia City, certainly we have the comedy technology to do it in Las Vegas today. With such potential, it would be a shame to see the city mired in a comedy of errors.