When my wife and I first started dating, we bonded over the goofy cable series Three Sheets. She loved to travel, I liked drinking at interesting bars and host and comedian Zane Lamprey was doing both in different destinations around the world. We were jealous, and we weren’t the only ones.
“No exaggeration, I’ve met probably 50 people in that same situation who ended up getting married and naming their kid Zane,” Lamprey says. “It’s not necessarily naming them after me. I think it’s just in their head, Hey, that’s a cool name. But almost every night when I’m on tour, I hear that story.”
The ever-enthusiastic entertainer and entrepreneur moved on to other TV projects (including Drinking Made Easy for Mark Cuban’s former HDNet enterprise), while simultaneously building a comedy career, touring the country doing stand-up at bars and breweries. His latest tour reaches one of its biggest gigs on August 12, when Lamprey steps outside his boozy comfort zone for a show at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay.
“For me, it’s a favorite venue,” he says. “For my first stand-up tour 10 or 11 years ago, I did a bunch of House of Blues spots. When you’re set up to have an amazing rock show, comedy always works out amazing there, because of the lighting, the tech, the audio, the ambiance. It’s definitely going to be a highlight.”
The last time he was in Las Vegas—and as you can imagine, a prominent personality working in the travel and bar space spends a lot of time in Las Vegas—Lamprey played two sold-out shows at CraftHaus Brewery in Henderson. But that was last year’s tour, which he capped by shooting a TV special that will be distributed very soon. This trip will involve “new stories, new jokes, a polished new hour,” he says.
And his stand-up continues to evolve beyond what onscreen fans like my wife and I have come to expect, namely tales from the road and wild bar stories. “I don’t want to be just this nostalgia train,” he says. “I’m not just telling stories that you have to know the shows to understand. I get most excited for the people that get dragged to the show with their friends, that didn’t know what to expect, and leave thinking it was amazing and they had so much fun.”
So you’re going to get stories about Lamprey and his wife and life in LA, plus plenty of his own opinions and observations. And he’s going to get to spend a little more time in one of his favorite cities.
“I mean, listen, you’ve really got three cities in the U.S. that I would say are real drinking cities: New Orleans, Key West and Vegas. Very different experiences,” he says. “But let’s be honest. There’s nowhere in the country, nowhere in the world that can hold a candle to what Vegas offers. I’ve been to 72 countries and hundreds of cities. It’s like, how do you describe the color red? It’s Vegas. That’s it. Anyone who’s been there gets it.”
And when Lamprey’s in town, he has lots of local friends in the hospitality industry to show him all the new, cool places to visit. The hard part is remembering which amazing bars, restaurants and hidden gems he hit on the last whirlwind trip.
When forced to drop the names of some of his Vegas tour guides, Lamprey mentions longtime pals Tobin Ellis and Tony Abou-Ganim, two esteemed icons of the local bar scene. “The last time I was there with my wife, Tobin took us to five different places, and it definitely got foggier and foggier as the night went on,” he says.
As most Vegas regulars would agree, those are the best nights.
ZANE LAMPREY August 12, 7:30 p.m., $26-$41. House of Blues, 702-632-7600, concerts.livenation.com.
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