It seems every entertainer who comes to Atlantic City cannot resist a lame joke about the place, or about gambling. It's amazing, really. No matter who they are, Springsteen, Santana, Spektor, they all turn gooey in the Queen of Resorts. "Hey, anybody win any money today?" they all seem to ask their audiences at some point, as if that concept were hilarious in and of itself. But on Saturday, at the incredibly jammed with people Borgata, comedian Bill Maher weighed in with one that was not quite as lame as the ones I've heard before. "It's like religion," he said of the casinos. "They're selling an invisible product." Not bad. Though not as good as his Elliot Spitzer joke, which is unprintable. But the best Atlantic City story told by a comedian I've come across recently has to be the one in Steve Martin's excellent memoir of being a standup comic: "Born Standing Up." It seems that Martin's days of performing standup reached their end in 1981 in, naturally, Atlantic City. We screwed up on King Tut, and Martin said the heck with it. As he writes: "...I was exhausted, physically and existentially. When I performed the song King Tut, a guitar suspended on wires ... would descend from the rafters. I would then Tut walk over and strum it only once, and it would ascend back into the ceiling, creating the shortest guitar solo in the history of show business. For the third night, in a row, the guitar failed to descend, leaving me horribly stuck. I guess that I hadn't greased the right union guy."
Ouch.
He continues: "In the wings, I began swearing to myself. ... I went to my dressing room ... I never did stand-up again."
Oops, sorry about that.
Speaking of torsos, if you missed yesterday's blog post exhaustively documenting in photos the return for another season of tanning of our favorite beach bum, Bruno Battaglia, check it out. Bruno is in excellent mid-season form, though he admits to some awkward chest-back tan discrepancy.