Weekend to hold lots of laughs

By Joe Brown

Friday, July 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Seven comedians fly in to Las Vegas ... Sounds like the setup to a joke, but it’s happening right now. This week, the Las Vegas Sun chatted with the Smothers Brothers and Eddie Izzard, just two of the headliners at the center of a summer storm of comedy breaking over Las Vegas this weekend. (Read the interviews online at www.lasvegassun.com.) Sit down for a stand-up checkup with four more funny folks in town Friday and Saturday, most of them coming straight from your TV screen to the stage.

Jim Gaffigan

The whitest man in comedy, if not all of showbiz, the very, very pale Jim Gaffigan is on a 26-city, six-month tour, which plays the Mandalay Bay Theatre on Friday.

“I called it the ‘Sexy Tour’ purely as a joke on how we use sexy to sell everything in our culture, whether it be jeans or movies or albums,” says Gaffigan, who worked in advertising before getting into comedy. “As a balding, out-of-shape, married, 40-year-old guy with two kids, I thought it would be hysterical to go with the sexy theme.”

Gaffigan just finished taping his role in the TBS sports sitcom “My Boys,” so now he’s “getting back in stand-up mode, just pulling together material” for the tour, which will lead up to the filming of his second one-hour special for Comedy Central.

“My topics that I deal with are always the hard-hitting ones,” he says drolly, on the phone from his New York apartment. “You know: bacon, legal documents and beanbag chairs. And it’s always evolving. That Hot Pocket joke — I’ve been doing that for five or six years, but it’s gone through many versions.”

The Hot Pocket shtick is what he’s best-known for, and surprisingly, Gaffigan says he’s not tired of it.

“They just keep introducing new ones!” Gaffigan says. “Now there’s this whole wheat Hot Pocket — as if that was what was holding people back. ‘It’s OK if it’s poison on the inside, but if it’s encased in some nonwhite flour, then I would eat a Hot Pocket.’ It’s just this never-ending well of diarrhea that’s bubbling over.

“I’ve helped them so much that I should get my own Hot Pocket,” Gaffigan says. “It would probably just be filled with sunscreen, I suppose. I do think an all-bacon Hot Pocket, that would be a combination of evil and good in one.”

In a Washington Post interview, Gaffigan mused that he thinks we’re about to enter an all-Pocket era. “I think that soon we won’t even be using forks. Everything we eat will be in a Hot Pocket. There will be Hot Pocket deodorant. There will be Hot Pocket cologne that smells like after you eat a Hot Pocket, unfortunately.”

The Indiana-born Gaffigan is unusual among headline comics in that he does a clean, all-ages-appropriate show, and even does a meet-and-greet with his fans after every one. He’s looking forward to his Vegas date. “I kind of like Vegas without a plan,” says Gaffigan. “Vegas is one of those towns where you secretly hope they don’t add another show, because then it just pushes it later and later. And the audience always has this relaxed feel, kind of like, ‘Don’t worry, our eggs are not all in this basket, we’re gonna do something insane after this.’ So there’s an easiness to it.”

He’s got a pretty sweet acting gig going (a lot of people remember him from the movie “Super Troopers” — he’s the driver the highway cops say “Meow” to) and he figures he doesn’t need to choose between acting and stand-up:

“It would be like only eating bacon and not having sausage occasionally.”

Craig Ferguson

The host of CBS’ “Late Late Show” is coming in for a week of stand-up at the MGM Grand. The Vegas stint should be no sweat for the Scottish comic after performing at the White House Correspondents Association dinner a few months ago — following the president himself. Ferguson told The Washington Post he thought things went well, but some people might have been ticked off at some of his jokes. Vice President Dick Cheney, for starters. “Tonight we mark the end of an era,” Ferguson said from the podium. “George W. Bush leaves in eight months. The vice president is already moving out of his residence. It takes longer than you think to pack up an entire dungeon.” Later, Ferguson told his TV audience that after the dinner, “Dick Cheney came up to me backstage. He patted me on the back and said, ‘Enjoy your audit.’ He is funny for an evil guy, I tell you. You can say what you like, but he knows funny.”

Judy Tenuta

Not only does Judy Tenuta convert comedy club audiences to her personal religion, “Judyism” — with herself as the object of worship, the Love Goddess — she recently became an ordained minister so she can perform legal gay marriages at her shows. “What better way to give back to my gay love slaves?” she says. “So now all of my studsicles and lesbetarians can take vows and it will be legal, and they can have it blessed by the goddess, if they so desire.” Tenuta says she’s ready to marry straight people, too, as long as they buy a ticket to her show (she was once married to equally eccentric comic Emo Phillips). Tenuta just released a new best-of CD, “Buy This Again, Pigs!” something of a sequel to her first album, “Buy This, Pigs!”

Jay Leno

If you catch the late-night king’s stand-up stint at the Mirage Friday and Saturday, expect to hear Leno riff about the ongoing game of musical chairs going on with the late-night TV hosts. Here’s a recap: Conan O’Brien will take over Leno’s seat on the “Tonight Show” in June; Jimmy Fallon is slated to take over for O’Brien when he slides into Leno’s chair. This week, Leno tried to put a comic spin on the touchy subject: Seated among the press corps, disguised in a bald cap, glasses and a goatee (one critic in attendance said Leno looked like James Lipton’s older brother), Leno tossed out the first question to network execs. “When is Jay Leno’s last day?” he bellowed from the back of the room. “(Green Bay Packers quarterback) Brett Favre retired and then wanted to come back,” Leno said to the NBC honchos. “The Packers said no. What do you make of that?” And, “Is it true you’ve offered Leno a fifth hour on the ‘Today’ show?” Leno volleyed. “That’s a great idea, actually,” an NBC veep answered. “Nah,” Leno replied, “it’s a crappy idea.”