You’ll notice some new energy when strolling through MGM Grand’s vast restaurant and retail district leading to the Grand Garden Arena. Some buzz starts to build as you approach Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House, then you round the corner to be faced with a swanky cocktail lounge with live music, beckoning to you to stop in before dinner or the show. And that’s just the beginning.
This is the new location of Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club, which first opened in the subterranean hall of shops between the resort’s lobby and parking garage 11 years ago. During the pandemic, it temporarily moved into a banquet space near the arena to allow socially distanced stand-up comedy performances, and as soon as it returned to its intimate original location, plans were in the works for a permanent location to this much more prominent spot, formerly the China Tang restaurant.
Brad Garrett
“They [MGM] brought it to me,” says Garrett, the 6-foot-8 comedian we all know from Everybody Loves Raymond and his new, hilarious commercials as the “King of Cold Cuts” for the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain. “The club was doing so well downstairs when they proposed this opportunity, and getting any spot on the Strip can be brutal. The timing was right.”
The comedy space actually seats fewer guests, down 40 to about 210, but the stage “is a lot closer to the audience and the room is wider, so it’s really intimate, which everyone really seems to love,” he says. “The comics are loving the room. It kind of feels like the old New York rooms we came up in ... except there are no bad seats.”
The separate lounge space adds a dynamic pre- and post-show element, but the real advantage is the location. Most of the seminal Vegas comedy rooms—the Laugh Factory at the Tropicana or the Comedy Cellar at the Rio, for example—are tucked into casino corners. Garrett’s club is at the heart of one of the biggest high-traffic areas at the sprawling MGM Grand.
And it continues to book up-and-comers within the comedy scene, including performers who have moved to Las Vegas during the uncertainty of the past few years in the live entertainment industry. Celebrity drop-ins also continue; the downstairs club saw Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno appear unannounced, and former Westgate headliner George Wallace took the stage at the new spot earlier this month. “We’re keeping the bar high, except for when I’m there,” Garrett cracks.
He’ll be back in his club hosting and performing on September 21, but don’t be surprised to see him sneak in for this weekend’s World Series of Comedy Main Event, with the semifinal and final rounds of the annual stand-up comedy festival and competition set for September 17 at 6 and 8 p.m. respectively.
The WSOC has been touring through a dozen cities around North America with more than 500 comics battling for the crown. Prizes include paid gigs at comedy club hot spots across the country and a record contract, and some of the former competitors who have become regulars at Garrett’s Vegas spot include Landry, Spencer James, Trixx, Jason Cheny and DJ Sandhu.
In early 2023 you can see Garrett in the new AppleTV+ series High Desert with Patricia Arquette and Matt Dillon. It’s a darkly comedic drama “about this desert community, a bunch of misfits trying to figure out life,” Garrett explains. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
BRAD GARRETT’S COMEDY CLUB MGM Grand, 866-740-7711, bradgarrettcomedy.com. Monday-Thursday, 7-11 p.m.; Friday-Sunday, 7 p.m.-midnight.
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