Modified On February 12, 2009
Jerry Fink interviews Joe Sanfelipo for the Vegas Sun. The Florida-based booker opened a room at the Palace Station… or re-opened it.
That has been a winning formula for Sanfelippo, who now owns a string of 20 or so comedy clubs across the country, with the heaviest concentration in Florida. His latest opened a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, in Palace Station. Bonkerz took over the former Laugh Trax showroom, where previous comedy clubs either failed or fell victim to management changes. The L.A. Comedy Club was there for almost a year and is now at Trader Vic’s on the Strip. Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back Kotter fame had Kaplan’s Laugh Trax there for a few months in 2002.
Sanfelippo plans to market top-notch comedians to locals.
“I’m the kind of guy who looks to fill seats,” he says.[…]
The snobbery part comes in the beginning, when Sanfelipo talks about giving Carrot Top an early leg up. He says that his club “was the first, maybe the second place he had ever performed at in his life.” We found it refreshing that Sanfelipo allows that it may have been the second club! Usually comedy mega-stars have two or three owners scrambling to take credit for being the first (and they’d never let someone else have possible credit).
Vegas is now well positioned to take advantage of an economic resurgence. There may be more comedy rooms there now than there has ever been.
Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was fuming earlier this week because of a quote from our new president at a stop in Elkhart, IN, to sell the stimulus plan.
We’re going to do something to strengthen the banking system. You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you pay taxpayers back. You can’t get corporate jets. You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s got to be some accountability and some responsibility.
Trips to Vegas (or elsewhere) are an important part of managing a company, an important part of incentivizing employees. It’s not just wild parties and champagne. (Did anyone read the full-page ad that Wells Fargo took out in USA Today on Monday? “Recognition events are still part of our culture. It’s really important that our team members are still valued and recognized.”)
We know of a handful of corporate comics whose bookings are down recently. This meme that parties or gatherings or “recognition events” are wreckless or wasteful is having a real effect on tourism, on casinos, on the hospitality industry– and on comics.
The spectacle of House and Senate members lecturing corporate executives for “wasteful spending” is like something from a bad Paddy Chayefsky script. Talking down spending– as if all spending is merely money thrown into a shredder– is the exact opposite of stimulus.