Brad Garrett is finishing a weekend run at his eponymous comedy club at the MGM Grand. The room is packed. Garrett is destroying the place. He spots a guy in the front row, wearing a beige newsboy cap, walking shorts and a red-and-black-patterned, button-down shirt.
This is how the battering starts. “I see you dressed up tonight,” Garrett says, leaning his 6-foot-8-inch frame forward. “Do they not have mirrors at Circus Circus?”
Garrett knows how to break down a room, but he doesn’t know this guy. His target is Las Vegas musician Curt Miller, a popular entertainer known around town as The Trombonist to the Stars. This is the first time he’s seen Garrett’s act.
Miller was in Steve Martin’s orchestra at the Riviera (yep, Martin headlined the Riv with a full orchestra) in the 1970s and early ’80s. In one bit, Martin paused to introduce the players. The curtain opened, showing about 10 musicians in their seats, blithely reading newspapers. The rest of the seats were empty. The players peered over their papers for a moment, looking bored, then returned to reading. The crowd laughed every night.
This was comedy gold from a bygone era. It is serendipitous that Garrett unknowingly found this individual. The comedian’s career is steeped in the history of this city.
Visor advisories
The 66-year-old Garrett celebrates his 40th anniversary as a Vegas headliner in September. His first performances were opening for country hit-maker Crystal Gayle at the Desert Inn (Encore/Wynn Las Vegas today) from Sept. 4 to 24, 1986.
Garrett was coming off a 1984 triumph on “Star Search,” with its original “American Idol” format, winning the Grand Champion first-place award of $100,000, Soon after, he debuted on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” saying his “average set” was enough to propel him to big stages. Vegas was among the first.
“I was 26 years old, just loving it, and Crystal treated me like part of the family,” Garrett says. “I remember when I was introduced, I came through the audience and gave out plastic custom visors with my name on it. Crystal is asking me, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in from the backstage? Like most performers? It’s not a carnival.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t have an act, so I need to give out the visors.’ ”
But Garrett had an act. He became a sought-after opener for such superstars of the era as Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra (who referred to him as “Greg Barrett” from the stage without being corrected), Diana Ross, Chuck Berry, The Temptations, Randy Newman, Tony Bennett, Liza Minnelli, the Righteous Brothers, Smokey Robinson, David Copperfield and Tony Orlando. He toured with Julio Iglesias, spinning his English-language act for a Spanish-speaking crowd simply because Iglesias loved his jokes.
Stop at the Trop, then MGM
Fast-forward (waaaay forward), and the former co-star of “Everybody Loves Raymond” is in his 17th year of comedy club operation on the Strip. Garrett opened his first club at the Trop in 2010, running it for 18 months until relocating to the MGM Grand’s Underground in 2012. In 2021, he moved upstairs, to the old China Tang restaurant location on the promenade to the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
He has ramped up his performance schedule to bolster business and sate his appetite to perform. Tickets start at $75 when the namesake is onstage, $36 when he’s not. The place fills faster when Garrett is in town.
“A lot of it is keeping the club going,” he says. “But I have to tell you, a lot of it’s because I’m loving it. I’m doing more stand-up now than I did in my 30s, which was not the plan.”
Garrett emphasizes that he even relishes the business side of the comedy biz.
“As crazy as it sounds, I love going, ‘Well, I think the poster for next week can have a little less yellow around the headshot,’” he says. “I’m at the point where I’m doing all of this work for an industry that is becoming unrecognized.”
Adjusting to the socials
Garrett’s old-school sensibilities collide with the new order of stand-ups. He’s booked acts who have hit it big on TikTok and expect to easily sell out his 210-seat club.
This could be called the Rude Awakening Series.
“What’s happening in the club circuit is, a guy could be on TikTok, he can blow up doing crowd work in South Carolina, get 1 million or 2 million views, and sell out across the country — one time,” Garrett says. “And club owners in the Midwest and South who really need to pay their rent are saying, ‘Look, this guy who does a thing with a wine glass and a parrot, he has 4 million views! He’s going to sell out a night in Tupelo! And we’re going to pick the local headliners from the club circuit to open for him!’ ”
Garrett says that business model is not for Las Vegas.
“We had a guy who was huge on TikTok, he had 6 million followers, he wanted to play the club, and he wanted this crazy amount of money,” he says. “And I go, ‘You know what? It doesn’t compute. You’re not going to outdraw a Bill Burr or Sebastian Maniscalco.’ But he says, ‘You have a 200-seater; I can sell that out on a Monday.’”
Garrett, an avid poker player, called the hand. He even offered the comic a more appealing box-office headlining spot on a Saturday, saying, “If you can sell that out, I’ll give you your number.”
The headliner sold 70 tickets that Saturday.
“He tells me, ‘This has never happened to me,’ and I said, ‘Vegas is like no other place,’ ” Garrett says. “They don’t come to a comedy club to see a certain act. They come because they want to do comedy on one night, and then another night’s a big show or something else.”
Comedian at the core
Garrett is adaptable — to a point. He shrugs off the realities of a fast-advancing entertainment culture. This is a performer who won three Emmys during his “Raymond” era. He was nominated for three others, and for his terrific portrayal of Jackie Gleason in the “Gleason” TV biopic.
But those trophies were worth as much as paperweights when Garrett met with a network a year ago for a possible pilot.
“They asked about my social media, and I went, ‘What do you mean?’ And they went, ‘Well, how many followers do you have?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, 12?’ ” Garrett says. “They tell me, ‘We’re really looking for someone to have like a million or more followers, and I go, ‘To get an acting job and a pilot?’ ”
Still, Garrett is working on a live concert series from his club, something that will draw budding comics who do have a lot of followers. He says he’s in “small talks” to develop a series from the MGM Grand that could be sold to Netflix or Hulu.
“It’s nothing really groundbreaking, but it’s such a great venue, it looks so great on camera,” Garrett says. “It’s the type of business now where you’ve almost got to make your own product, your own thing, then sell it to a platform.”
For Garrett, the philosophy of reaching an audience with a custom product — whether its free visors or new comedy clips — still resonates. He still hands out custom hats at the end of his sets, as an “apology” to the folks he’s picked on. I know a Las Vegas musician who wants one. He’s paid his dues, too.
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow @johnnykats on X, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.