VINNIE FAVORITO COMEDY SHOW REVIEW
O'Sheas Casino, 3555 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV 89119
(702) 733-3333
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SHOW REVIEW: Vinnie Favorito
Everybody's a Target: The best part of comedian Vinnie Favorito's act is the time he spends sparring with
audience members
By MIKE WEATHERFORD
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Vinnie Favorito is a comedian who is at his best when he's working the crowd, and a small crowd provides a more
thorough workout.
If you think you can escape his scrutiny when you're lined up like sitting ducks in rows of theater seats, think
again. And if he does perchance fail to mess with you, you feel left out.
The obscure 150-seat theater at O'Sheas -- once home to a museum of ventriloquism -- is Favorito's second
attempt to move from comedy club regular to year-round headliner of a long term show.
The first was staged in a spacious ballroom at Binion's. It was dripping with old-Vegas atmosphere and a fitting
match for Favorito's brand of latter-day Don Rickles put-down humor. Neither comedian ever met an ethnic
stereotype he didn't like.
Just before Christmas, the Boston club veteran relaunched on the Strip -- again produced by Mac King associate
Bill Voelkner -- in the casino annex to the Flamingo. "Now I'm workin' the attic of an Irish pub," he tells the crowd.
"This is a dream come true right here. If the terrorists come back, they're not hitting this (expletive) building."
The room has all the atmosphere of the dinkiest screen of your local movie megaplex, though it did get a good
cleaning and coat of paint for this venture. It's not the kind of place that jump-starts a festive, drinking mood. But
the no-frills environment does lend credence to the show poster's subtitle: "Buckle Up."
Favorito does a few minutes of dispensable comedy club material: ATMs, driving in Los Angeles, $38 haircuts and
the like. But the real fun is the high-wire act of watching him try to make it up on the spot as he spars with patrons.
When a serviceman tells him he flies to Iraq every month, Favorito replies, "What, you have a timeshare?"
A woman he's been ogling tells him, in a valley-girl drawl, that she plans to be a doctor. "Really? Not if you talk like
that." He turns to the crowd and notes, "I shoulda not talked to her. I would have lived out the fantasy."
But Favorito doesn't come up with so many quotable one-liners as riffs that exist in the moment. He pries
information out of people and ties one stranger to the next.
He slices through the cryptic, euphemistic job descriptions such as "food service." "Were you a cook? Were you a
waiter? Were you the Hamburgler? ... You worked in a grocery store. Well (expletive) say that!"
When two guys upfront tell him they're friends because "we swam in college," you get the expected double-take
and bombardment of gay jokes. Better, though, is how "swimmers" becomes a casual code word for "gay" for the
rest of the show: "You look a little upset. Is it the swimmers?"
Like Rickles, however, a lot of it is short cutting via racial humor: Single out an ethnicity and plug in the jokes. This
means all Mexicans are lazy and all blacks are shifty badasses, unless they are named Warren: "That is the
uncoolest black name I ever heard of."
It's all fine in Favorito's mind because he delivers it with a smile and because he is Italian, which means he can
make Mafia jokes about himself. And when the lines elicit groans, he tells the crowd, "You suburban people gotta
lighten up."
Not being one who is overburdened by political correctness, the stereotyping didn't offend me so much as set me
to thinking back to Dave Chappelle's November show in Las Vegas. Instead of recycling the cliches, Chappelle
upends the old stereotypes to mine them from a fresh perspective.
Favorito is too old-school for that. But unless this is just completely not your thing, you're likely to be too busy
laughing at the other people -- or listening to them laugh at you -- to care.