The Comedy Festival, Day 1 - Arrival

Not to dis Wayne Newton, but when I think of Vegas I don’t always think of the greatest acts in the world - or at least the acts that I want to see. But the fact that there’s more or less nine shows I want to check out in the space of these four days means that I’ll be spending very little time at the craps tables, unlike my usual Sin City visits.

One thing I noticed at the airport that adds to the argument that we’re in a boom: Rolling Stone’s cover story in an exclusive interview with Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen as himself. The only one as himself. Potential Borat backlash aside - (Friday night, I heard “very nice” three times on my walk home, I love the movie but shut the fuck up), this is a follow up to last issue’s Daily Show cover. One of the conceits of the 80s was that comedy is the new rock and roll. Now, comedy is the new rap-funk-ska fusion. But the conceit is the same. This is, of course, assuming the cover of Rolling Stone still means something.

The Comedy Festival is taking place at Caesar’s Palace, and the regular layer of roman cheese is overlaid with slight accent of humor cheese, with much of the hotel staff wearing propeller beanies that sadly, haven’t caused anyone to collapse to the crowd in a convulsion of hilarity that requires medical attention. But here’s hoping.

One major bummer already: I’ve missed an event featuring Vegas-style fountains replicated by the web-popular duo of Mentos and diet, uh, “soda”. I’ll just have to go watch the Bellagio fountains and imagine. Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere also just pulled a prank in the pool that I just missed as well. It’d be hard to top the Baby Ruth in the pool bit from Caddyshack, but I’m sure he was up for it.

Tonight is my insult comedy night with shows from Don Rickles and Triumph’s “Poopapalooza II” - I can’t wait to be demeaned!

Also, there was a big announcement that HBO is jumping into the comedy broadband pool with AOL with thisjustin.com, which sounds interesting although the name implies that it might be competitive with the news satire site being developed by IAC/InterActiveCorp and the Huffington Post. Hopefully I’ll hear a bit more about this as we go along. But there’s not a lot of elbow room in web comedy any more, huh?