Comedy Cellar Las Vegas Review

Comedy Cellar History

The Comedy Cellar is a legendary comedy club in Manhattan where many top comedians perform. It was founded in 1982. The Comedy Cellar uses a showcase format. A show will consist of between five and seven comics performing sets of roughly 10 to 15 minutes each. Comedy Cellar opened a location in Las Vegas in 2018 inside the Rio Hotel. Their website says “This intimate 300-seat club brings the laughs in a unique underground vibe.” We were recently in Las Vegas and decided to try out the Comedy Cellar Las Vegas venue. We agree with the “underground vibe” description.

The Entrance to the Comedy Cellar

This sign is the first thing we saw when we got to the club entrance inside the Rio. It did not shout “we are thrilled to have you here and we hope you enjoy this show that is supposed to make you laugh.” There were two lines, one for VIP tickets and the other for general admission. We had “preferred” tickets and did not know which line to be in. So we went into the VIP line. Security sternly told us the VIP line was only for those with VIP tickets and forced us into the general admission line.

After entering the correct line, security padded us down with hand held metal detector wands. I am all for extra security in today’s world and you can never be too safe. However, the venue is inside a busy casino that has no metal detectors at the casino entrances. Checking for weapons inside the casino makes no sense. So someone could bring a weapon into the casino undetected but not into the comedy club?

I already disliked this place.

Comedy Cellar Las Vegas – The Venue

Next we entered the actual venue. It was dark and dingy with a low ceiling, but this is common for comedy clubs and perhaps part of the experience that they call an “underground vibe.” The seating arrangement was awful. The VIP seats in the front faced the stage, as did the general admission seats in the back. Long tables perpendicular to the stage with seats facing the table were in the middle. Seats were packed in so tight that they could not be rotated to face the stage. So you had to try to sit on them at a 45 degree angle, turn your neck and lean over the table so the person’s head in front of you didn’t block your view.

If you have ever been to Fenway Park in Boston, the viewing experience at the Comedy Cellar was similar to sitting in Fenway’s right field seats that face the left field wall rather than home plate. Continuing with the “shame the customer” experience, the venue showed not one video about turning off cell phones, but several with different colors, fonts and graphics. The limited beer selection included only big name mass market beers.

Comedy Cellar Las Vegas – The Show

The show featured five comedians who were generally OK, not great, not terrible. Four of the five were 58 to 70, with the youngest being 40. But we are only reviewing the venue here.

All of the comedians interacted with the audience, which I consider a big positive and many times the funniest part of a comedy show. But this created confusion with the rules that the venue forced on us. When are we allowed to talk to the comedian? If he/she engages with us, at what point do we have to stop talking? If the comedian insults us, can we respond or do we just have to take it?

Maybe this sounds like semantics, but a real situation happened with the last comedian. A woman a few rows in front of us to the left said something unintelligible to us and not particularly loud. The comedian stopped the show and went into a speech about not talking at the comedian. Every time he said something to her about not talking, she responded and then he scolded her again. Eventually this potential infinite loop stopped and the comedian said “now you made me lose my place” before remembering and going back to his scripted bit.

The scolding and interruption of the show was far worse than whatever this person said. Any comedian with decades of experience on stage dealing with hecklers should have handled it differently. His reaction drained the room of laughs far more than whatever this woman said. Even the cliche response “do I come to your place of work and interrupt you” would have been better.