Geeks flee, but Vegas may get the last laugh

FOR years, November signaled the arrival of 200,000 computer geeks, who’d talk tech for a week and pack the topless bars. But the collapse of the Comdex convention last year left a substantial hole on the calendar, and though Las Vegas is never a ghost town, it was hard to laugh off the impact of the retreat of the nerds.

The arrival of 80 comedy acts next weekend, though, may help. Goodbye Comdex, hello the Comedy Festival, which brings panels, movies and marquee talent including Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart and Chris Rock to seven venues at Caesars Palace and the Flamingo.

The festival is an outgrowth of the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., and like the Aspen event, it’s run by HBO executive Bob Crestani, who sees Vegas as a natural venue: “A lot of the contemporary comedians play there. We just tried to bring them all at one time over a three-day weekend.”

Comedian George Lopez, who performs regularly at the Las Vegas Hilton, says he’s enjoying the prospect of all that imported competition. “I am looking forward to it as if it were a boxing match and I have a big fight in Vegas. There has never been anything of this magnitude.”

And perhaps there’s a reason for that. George Wallace, a regular headliner at the Flamingo for the last two years, says he has doubts about whether comedy can attract enough people to Las Vegas to provide an audience for so much talent. “It is going to be difficult,” says Wallace, who will perform in the festival. “There is no buzz about this at all, even with the local people. This is not Aspen. People don’t come to Las Vegas for comedy.” Festival organizers, in other words, are going to have to bring their own crowd.

Crestani says he’s confident he will. While not offering any information on advance sales or how many people he hopes to draw, he says that “based on our reports, we are feeling very comfortable that people are coming from all over who want to partake in our first festival.”

Hoping to make this an annual event, organizers are trying to connect it with comedy’s past and future. They’ve created the Comedian, an award for influencing and furthering the art of comedy, and first recipient Jerry Seinfeld will come to town to claim it. A panel on the history of Vegas comedy will be hosted by Larry King and feature a who’s who of surviving members of the old guard, including Shecky Greene and Jerry Lewis (with Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles appearing via satellite).

Vegas audiences like to laugh, and the greats have given them lots of opportunities, but they’re hardly known for their comedy connoisseurship. “The sort of comedy that does well in Vegas is the kind that hits people over the heads, the obvious comedy,” says Steve Schirripa, who has booked the comedians for the Riviera Comedy Club since 1995 and managed it since 1986, when it was known as the Improv. “You can be way too hip for the rooms there. They don’t want anything that is too serious, too political or too edgy.”

Lopez, who began performing in Las Vegas in 1987 and appeared in a range of revues including Playboy’s Girls of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Harrah’s Improv, agrees. “When I think of Vegas comedy years ago, almost like a ghost whisper, I see people in shorts with fanny packs.” That audience isn’t always appreciative of envelope pushing. George Carlin claimed last year that MGM fired him, after a four-year run, because his act was too dark and he’d refused to change it. He’s now at the Stardust.

The big names like Carlin will always do well here. And, certainly the Comedy Festival should draw big crowds for the likes of Stewart and Dane Cook. But it will be interesting to see how audiences applaud adventurous comedy like that of Lucha Va Voom, which sets its burlesque amid masked Mexican wrestlers. And what will they make of the Comedy Festival’s opening spectacular, “Earth to America!,” a two-hour, star-studded use of comedy to raise awareness of global warming? That may seem very un-Vegas, but Lopez is convinced it won’t be a problem: “It is different now. It is a more receptive audience today; they’re hipper, they’re younger and they’re more attractive.”

Wallace isn’t so sure. “We know Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling. But people who come here tend to not know a lot of the younger comedians.” Long term, though, even Wallace thinks the Comedy Festival is an idea whose time has come. Attendance “may not be good this year,” he says, “but I bet in two or three years the word will catch on and people will specifically say they are going to Vegas for the Comedy Festival.”

So, how many comedy fans will it take to replace a computer convention? Rather than offer a number, promoter John Meglen, president and co-CEO of AEG Live’s Concerts West, puts it this way: “We are going to judge it by how hard people laugh.”

Sirens’ sidewalk allure

A couple of years ago Treasure Island began to refer to itself as TI, presumably aiming at the sort of younger, hipper crowd known for its love of all things short and sweet. Out went the signature pirate banter on the property’s Strip front, replaced by the sexy show “The Sirens of TI.” The original production was a bit long for pedestrians standing in front of the hotel, but two years in things have gotten tighter, says Stacy Kane, 28, who has been a Siren since the show began. “It started out at 28 minutes and went to 23 minutes, and now it’s 18 minutes,” she says. See, shorter is better. Still, even the abbreviated version gets the message of TI across. As one Siren tells passers-by in this bit of enticing dialogue/doggerel: “If you are looking for the arcade, it’s no more, because this is an adult candy store.”

Diggin’ the jazz guy

LAS VEGAS offers all sorts of pleasures. Recently, I discovered that Mike Jones, who plays the piano while the audience awaits the start of the “Penn & Teller” show at the Rio, is a “classy, serious jazz cat,” as Penn describes him in the liner notes of one of Jones’ CDs. His latest release, “The Mike Jones Trio Live at the Green Mill,” came out earlier this fall on Chiaroscuro Records.

This feature on entertainment and life in Las Vegas will appear every other Sunday. For more on what’s happening on and off the Strip, see the blog latimes.com/movablebuffet on latimes.com.