Bonkerz owner has no use for comedic snobbery

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Bonkerz Comedy Club owner Joe Sanfelippo was one of the few in the business who recognized the potential of the young, red-haired son of a NASA rocket scientist.

Sanfelippo ignored the comments of the other comics. He could tell the guy was funny because the crowd was laughing.

The young comic? Carrot Top, who began his career performing at open-mike nights at the Bonkerz in Orlando, Fla., in the late ’80s.

“He started with us as an open-miker,” Sanfelippo recalls. “My club was the first, maybe the second place he had ever performed at in his life. He stayed with us for three years before he broke out.”

Sanfelippo remembers the reaction.

“The other comics in the club would stand in the back room and go ‘It’s prop comedy. It’s not real comedy.’ The comics would deride him,” he says. “I said, ‘Listen. What are the people in the audience doing right now?’ They said, ‘Well, they’re laughing, but they don’t know any better.’ I’m like, ‘How can they not know any better? They’re laughing and they’re paying the bills.’ ”

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. “We needed a location more local-driven. It makes more sense. You’ve already got four comedy clubs on the Strip. Anytime a resort has a thousand or more hotel rooms like Palace Station, you can get enough people in the club to break even, and anything else you get is gravy. Plus, Station Casinos has a strong presence in the locals market.”

The keys to his success are a good location and reasonable prices. With today’s economy reeling and folks looking for bargains, it’s hard to beat comedy shows, he says. Bonkerz clubs are always found inside resorts, hotels and casinos.

“That’s our model,” he says. “We don’t do free-standing strip malls where the comedy club is the main destination. When you’re free-standing you’re paying rent on something seven days a week, 24 hours a day when you can only use it, say, four hours a night, four days a week.

“Free-standing clubs never work unless you’re really lucky and become a main attraction in a small city. But most comedy clubs come and go. We learned that early, and we always stuck with being inside hotels, casinos and resorts.”

Sanfelippo started out in Milwaukee in 1984.

“I was running a nightclub, doing live bands,” he says. “The seating capacity was 700 to 800 so we were doing semifamous people, on the way up and on the way down kind of thing.”

An agent pitched him a comedian. “This was in ’82 or ’83,” Sanfelippo says. “He said he would like to book a young comedian who was a substitute host on ‘The Tonight Show,’ a guy named Jay Leno, who was becoming a cult draw.”

It turned out working with comedians was easier than working with bands, so the nightclub gradually became a comedy club. By ’84 Bonkerz was in Milwaukee and Orlando and featured up-and-coming comics including Jerry Seinfeld, Sam Kinison and Carrot Top.

Sanfelippo books all of the acts, but his personal taste doesn’t enter into the equation.

“I don’t trust anybody else to pick the comics,” he says. “I stand in the back of the room and if people are laughing, he’s funny.

“For example, the late Bill Hicks. He was a very famous cult comic, the Dane Cook of his day 20 years ago. He was very dark and a lot of club owners didn’t like him because he wasn’t the happy-go-lucky Jerry Seinfeld kind of guy. I brought him in one night, stood at the back of the club and watched. He was really dark, but people really liked him.”

Comedians have to be consistent, Sanfelippo says. “Some comics can be funny one night, but lose it the next. You have to be funny every single night. That’s when you’re ready.”

He doesn’t mind “blue” material, but it depends on the location.

“Most most casinos want a PG-13 or soft R-rated show. Semi-bad words are OK, but they don’t want to hear heavy-duty stuff. Then some places are no holds barred,” he says.

“I’m an anti-censor type of person. Just whatever makes people laugh is what works. You have to be respectful of the individual location’s wishes and adjust to the location.”

Jerry Fink can be reached at 259-4058 or at [email protected].