Sunday, Jan. 8, 2006 | 8:33 a.m.
The success of November's Comedy Festival at Caesars Palace inspired the opening of a new comedy club in Las Vegas.
The three-day event featured a stellar lineup of the nation's top funny people, including Dennis Miller, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Ray Romano.
Tickets to the shows were hard to come by.
"I think there has been a resurgence in the interest in stand-up comedy," Angela Sampras said. "It seems to be bigger than ever."
And so Sampras and her fiance, Matt Stabile (who also are co-producers of "X" at the Aladdin's V Theatre), decided to take the plunge into the world of comedy.
Funny Business opened Dec. 26 at Krave, the avant garde nightclub attached to the Aladdin at the Strip and Harmon Avenue.
At 7 p.m. daily there is a cast of comics that includes hostess Pudgy! Queen of Tease, Joe Trammel, James Bean and Dave Russo. A guest comedian will join the cast each week.
The comedy club shares the nightclub/theater with the bawdy musical "Fashionistas," which is performed at 9:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.
Funny Business is one of five comedy clubs in Las Vegas, joining old-timers Riviera Comedy Club, the Comedy Stop at the Tropicana and the Improv at Harrah's; and the relatively new Comedy Zone at the Plaza.
Laugh Trax at Palace Station closed in July.
The Palms features stand-up comedy (Playboy's Hollywood Comedy Tour) once a month at The Lounge, hosted by Paul Hughes and Cort McGowan. Elon Gold, star of the Fox TV series "Stacked," will be the featured performer Saturday. Playmate Cassandra Lynn (Miss February) will be on hand to sign autographs.
Based upon its recurring cast of comedians, Funny Business should fare well in the competition for laughs in Las Vegas.
Sampras and Stabile have hired a mixture of veteran performers with excellent track records and a couple of up-and-comers who are still making their marks in the business.
Pudgy! Queen of Tease (Beverly Wines) is the most experienced of the ensemble.
The pudgy hostess is an excellent choice to warm up the crowds. Her forte is interacting with audiences, which she has been doing successfully for more than 20 years -- headlining comedy clubs and other venues from one end of the country to the other.
Wines dares you not to have fun when she's onstage, and by the end of her bit, she usually wins the dare.
Trammel is another veteran. For more than 10 years he has performed in such Las Vegas productions as "Splash," "Showgirls," "Crazy Girls" and "V, the Ultimate Variety Show."
It's hard to describe exactly what he does, but whatever it is, it is often hilarious.
In the space of about 15 minutes Trammel, a world-class street dancer, goes through dozens of costume changes as he lip-syncs parodies to movies, songs and performers.
The physical comic is a ball of energy as he switches from a man being eaten by a shark to Batman to the Village People.
He closes his act doing a "Lord of the Dance" bit that demonstrates his prowess as a dancer.
Bean doesn't have far to go when he performs at Funny Business. He's the comic relief for Sampras and Stabile's "X," which is in the V Theatre inside the Aladdin's Desert Passage.
Bean is a likable comedian who, in his relatively short career, has opened for such heavyweights as George Wallace, Chris Rock, Jeff Foxworthy, Patti LaBelle and Dave Chappelle.
His brand of humor is observational, noting the peculiarities of humanity and the interaction of people -- from how people lose their depth perception in the desert ("Just because you can see the Stratosphere, that doesn't mean it's a block away") to the irony of the KKK adopting a highway ("White trash picking up white trash").
While Bean can be raunchy, most of his material the night I attended the performance was pretty tame.
The least experienced comedian in the cast is Dave Russo.
Both he and Trammel appeared in E!'s Wayne Newton's "The Entertainer."
The Boston native, who bares an uncanny resemblance to actor Robert De Niro, has a lot of natural talent that seems to be improving with experience.
Russo is totally at ease onstage and relates well to his audiences.
Although some of his jokes are a little off-color, none is offensive.
Even those that may seem to border on political incorrectness are funny.
"Black guys shave their heads and they look like super heroes," he quipped. "White gives shave their heads and they look like serial killers."
His rapid delivery allows him to cram a lot of humor into the 15 or 20 minutes he is allotted.
"I was home schooled," Russo said. "I don't want to brag, but I graduated first in my class."
Whether Funny Business will graduate first in its class of comedy clubs remains to be seen, but with the class of comedians it has in the spotlight it will provide some stiff competition.
Jerry Fink can be reached at 259-4058 or at [email protected].
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