A few days later, The Comedy Festival would be packing Caesars Palace's Colosseum with comedy fans and headliners like Jon Stewart, George Lopez, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. But tonight at the Plaza, comedians with names like B.T., Phil Van T., Sally Mullins and Marc Ryan don't have a built-in audience. In fact, their brightest hope is to win a contract to turn pro by working on a cruise ship, beginning their climb to fame between bouts of ship-borne illness and narrow escapes from pirates.
There were 10 finalists at the Carnival Comedy Challenge hoping to win that shot at one of comedy's lower rungs. They took their turns onstage at the Comedy Zone in the Plaza, in front of an audience of maybe 75 people, which made for a respectable-looking turnout in the small room.
For a desert, Las Vegas has had a surprisingly tight relationship with cruise-ship entertainment, as both catered to the same segment of Middle America. In his show, Harrah's headliner Clint Holmes frequently reminisces about his time working on ships, and numerous other performers in town—from hypnotists to jugglers—have gone to sea.
Of course, Las Vegas has changed quite a bit in the past decade, while the cruise-ship audience—perhaps not so much. Virginia Cornacchione, entertainment supervisor for Carnival and one of the judges, explains her primary concern in evaluating comics: "What I look for is a comedian who can definitely work clean. They have to be able to do the family-oriented show. Most importantly is somebody who can work clean."
These days in Las Vegas comedy, working clean is not a requirement. From Jon Stewart to Dane Cook to Lewis Black, the participants in The Comedy Festival—even Stewart, who has a day job on television—are not known for skimping on the four-letter words.
So the Carnival Cruise Comedy Challenge was, unsurprisingly, not the place for envelope-pushing. The contestants were subjected to American Idol-style judging, and one comic was criticized for being mean—this in the town that made Don Rickles a star. As if to scream bland, the host of the event was a local weatherman, Mark Pfister from KTNV Channel 13.
The highlight of the night: Contestant Bob Sherwood having a spat with the judges after being told he came off as unlikable. "Lewis Black has nothing to fear," one judge said. Excuse me, but Lewis Black's material wouldn't exactly win plaudits from the cruise-ship league. How would that family show go?
Still, even in this degraded form (or maybe even particularly in this pathetic arena) it is amazing to observe just how hard the actual work of comedy is. At the Colosseum, the best comedians make it look effortless. At the Carnival Comedy Challenge, you really get to see the contestants (in some cases literally) sweat. Each participant has to do six minutes of material (the expiration warning delivered courtesy of a blinking pink Flamingo), and for a few it was painfully clear how tough that is. Before he was judged unlikable, Sherwood got into trouble by trying different material than what brought him to the final round. The judges complained that it felt like leftovers—he should have done the same jokes twice, funny being more important than fresh and original. On a cruise ship, the audience keeps changing so the jokes don't need to. Another contestant puttered out after about four minutes, unable to come up with any bit in his repertoire that could fit into the remaining time.
The winner was B.T., who talked about growing up black in Oklahoma around white people. His jokes tended toward him being miscast because of stereotypes—for example, trying to play basketball although he sucked at it. This, the judges decided, was funny and likable, and, according to Cornacchione, B.T. will soon be appearing on a Carnival cruise.
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