The show is free and so is the advice.
“I suggest people sit closer,” Dennis Lavender begins, smiling knowingly beneath a white fedora, his grin like lightning foreshadowing a thunderous punchline. “Because if you sit closer to the stage, when a comic’s joke doesn’t work, you get to see the failure in their eyes — it makes it even funnier.”
He chuckles, as if to lead by example.
“Hopefully someone makes you laugh,” Lavender suggests without sounding especially hopeful. “If you crack a smile, you got what you paid for.”
He pauses, waiting for the audience to remember there was no cover charged here at the Luv Lounge, an upscale hookah bar and restaurant.
“Think about that,” he urges, allowing time for the joke to hold, before trying again. “I’ll repeat myself.”
Lavender is an old hand at this by now, hosting weekly open mics in nontraditional comedic settings, which he’s been doing locally for close to a decade.
He knows the challenges — and the possibilities — and he handles them well, opening the night by riffing on the pros and cons of dating a friend’s ex and questioning the merits of certain self-help adages (“‘What don’t kill you makes you stronger?’ Diabetes don’t make me stronger. You can’t be tough with one foot.”)
He’s got one rule: “If you sign up, you go up,” and around a dozen aspiring stand-ups are here to do just that, ranging from traveling pros to a few nervous types getting some of their first stage time.
‘Vegas is right there’
Scenes like this have become increasingly common in recent years.
At the same time as Lavender’s show, there’s an open mic at Wiseguys comedy club in Town Square. A few hours later, comedian Lex Las Vegas hosts a showcase at the Beach House in Henderson.
And all this is on a Wednesday.
“When I got here 14 years ago, it was like, ‘What side of town am I gonna go to hit a mic? Because it was either one mic going on in Henderson or one mic going on closer to the city,’ ” recalls Lavender, a California transplant. “Now, there’s a mic every day of the week.
“I don’t do it for the money — I don’t make much off of it,” he continues. “This is more for the scene. We do have a low-key great scene. I’m from L.A. — L.A. stands alone; New York stands alone. But Vegas is right there. And it’s growing. I see so much growth here.”
And said growth is happening on multiple levels.
There are the big-room comedy clubs headlined by national touring acts, whose ranks have swelled in recent years with the additions of the Comedy Cellar at the Rio (2018), Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club at the Linq Promenade (2019) and Wiseguys (2023) joining longer-running staples like Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at the MGM Grand, the L.A. Comedy Club at The Strat and the venerable Laugh Factory, now at the Horseshoe after a long run at the Tropicana.
But there’s also a vibrant indie scene incubating an abundance of local talent at open mics and comedy showcases around the city every night of the week, a blossoming, DIY, grassroots community sprouting everywhere from barbecue joints to breweries, rock dives to seafood joints.
“I’ve been doing comedy in this scene since 2008, and it is absolutely the healthiest it’s ever been,” notes Phil Kotler, a veteran comedian and producer who hosts “The L8 Nite Set” on Saturdays at Jimmy Kimmel’s, “The Midnight Mic” on Tuesdays at The Composers Room and more. “The fact that there used to be one or two open mics a week back in the day, and now you could literally do three, four, sometimes five, six shows a night as you’re getting reps in, I think for a scene or a market like this, that’s very powerful.“
‘There’s no judging’
Lavender could have used a laugh when he first got into comedy.
Life was dealing him body blows at the time: He was going through a divorce and had recently gotten fired.
He was still living in L.A., and a date took him to a show at the Sunset Strip’s famed Comedy Store. The experience didn’t boost his spirits.
“It was trash,” Lavender recalls. “I guess the host knew it was horrible, and like right when I’m complaining, ‘You paid for these tickets?’? the host says, “Hey, if you think you could do any better, we have an open mic every Sunday.’”
Challenge accepted, Lavender got a spot on the show and wrote out his set word-for-word.
“I didn’t tell anybody it was my first time doing it. I didn’t want any pity laughs,” he recalls. “It was the longest three minutes ever. But I got a couple of laughs.”
That was enough; he’s been performing ever since.
“I would love to tell people it came from like, ‘I just thought one day I could do it,’” he says. “Nah, I was in a dark place. So that’s probably why, to this day, I like open mics, because there’s no judging.”
Upon relocating to Vegas in 2014, Lavender paid it forward, launching his first open mic here in 2017 at the now-shuttered Halo Nightclub.
“I needed more stage time, I wanted to try out my new jokes, and there was really not enough open mics to go to,” he says. “In Vegas, you have to create it yourself. You just gotta do it, right?”
‘There’s a path here’
Scads of comedians have followed suit and moved here in the years since, drawn to the city’s growing comedic infrastructure.
Among them: Kristeen von Hagen, a Juno Award-winning, Canadian American comedian once ranked among the “Top 30 Power Women in Canada” by Elle Magazine.
She chose Vegas over a market like L.A. because of its blend of numerous open mics, where she can work out new material, and paying gigs at venues like Brad Garrett’s and the Laugh Factory, where she’s performing this week.
“Vegas is good, because a lot of comics from all over move here as a hub,” explains von Hagen, who also has a regular gig as the opening act at “Puppetry of the Penis” at the Erotic Heritage Museum. “So, you have your old-school East Coast people, the L.A. crew, you’re getting like a mash of all these different scenes into one scene, and we’re lucky because we have lots of clubs here.
“Besides L.A. and New York, towns would have one or two clubs — that’s it,” she continues, “where we have like five clubs going at different times. So, it definitely draws better comics to come and live here. In L.A., it’s hard to make any money just doing spots and stuff. Here, there are shows that pay. And then the young locals are really strong, too.”
Kotler is among those locals who’ve climbed the ladder from open mics to performing regularly on the Strip at Kimmel’s in addition to producing his own shows.
“I never moved away, and I think part of that is because it did feel like this city continues to bubble into whatever it’s transforming to be,” he says. “It’s finally a big city versus like a giant town. We are the entertainment capital of the world, and it is very easy to produce here.
“I think those local productions are really strong, and there’s so many great venues to see a show or make a show,” he continues. “I think that is also indicative of the scene being healthy. There’s a path here in a way that maybe there wasn’t before.”
‘Stingy with their laughs’
“Y’all, like, a C-plus crowd.”
Back at the Luv Lounge, actor/comedian Chuck Burkes, who’s had roles in films like the 50 Cent biopic “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” is the first act after Lavender warms up the crowd — sort of.
Though Burkes is a skilled performer with strong material, the audience is slow to engage.
“Las Vegas is stingy with their laughs,” he notes playfully. “Thousands of people are laughing in my head.”
Now, two things can be true at once: While Las Vegas might offer an increasingly broad array of nightly opportunities for comedians to hone their chops, no one said it was going to be easy — especially in a city where plenty of bars lure patrons with video poker machines.
Try getting a laugh out of the dude chasing a royal flush as if paying his rent depended on it.
“All the stage time here is rough,” notes Alex Just, a scene vet celebrating his fifth year as a full-time comedian.
He knows what he’s talking about: After moving here in 2013, he soon launched the “Just F’in’ Comedy” open-mic night at the Dive Bar on Sundays, a locus of the scene that’s become the city’s longest-running non-casino comedy night.
Just also brought current comedy kingmaker Tony Hinchcliffe to the Dive back in the day and ran with one of America’s best contemporary comedians, Sam Tallent, when he briefly lived in Vegas a decade ago.
“In Vegas, you get tough skin very quickly,” says Just, who now primarily does corporate gigs. “You’ve got like the three people in the bar at the open mic that aren’t other comics. If they’re there randomly, they’ve got their back to you, and they’re addicted to what’s in front of them.
“So, if they turn around and laugh, you know you’ve really got something,” he continues. “I am very thankful in some ways for coming up here because when other places are like, ‘That’s a rough room,’ I was like, ‘You don’t even know what rough is. What are you talking about?’”
‘Great place to get started’
Just argues that such challenging settings can be a good thing — especially for up-and-comers.
“I think it’s a great place to get started, and I don’t think that has changed,” he says. “There are people that are like, ‘I’m going to go to L.A. and be a comedian,’ or ‘I’m going to go to New York to be a comedian,’ or even Austin. And it’s like, ‘Well, why would you want anyone in the place with the decision-makers to see you when you start out?’ That’s just bad strategy.
“If you need to get comfortable onstage, yeah, in New York I can do 10 mics a night or something. OK, neat,” he adds. “But here, at least you have a chance at any given kind of bar with gambling that there’s gonna be someone there who didn’t know there was an open mic. You get some audience members and you’ll have a few people to give you feedback.”
About that feedback — Lavender is going for it right about now.
After Burkes leaves the stage, he’s back on the mic, working the room the way you blow on a few glowing embers to try to get a campfire raging.
“Give it up for my mom in the back,” he says to a healthy round of applause, before making a confession. “She’s not really back there …”
It’s slow going at first, but the crowd is loosening up, the laughs are beginning to come more frequently. You just gotta do it, right?
Contact Jason Bracelin at [email protected] or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.