New York's most famous comedy basement was rebuilt brick for brick inside a Las Vegas casino. The Comedy Cellar at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, 3700 West Flamingo Road, opened in April 2018 as the first outpost of the Greenwich Village institution founded in 1982 by comedian Bill Grundfest and cafe owner Manny Dworman - the MacDougal Street room where Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Amy Schumer and Dave Chappelle came up, and the club by which American stand-up rooms are measured. Manny's son Noam Dworman, who inherited the Cellar, spent years hunting a Strip location before Caesars Entertainment offered the Rio showroom that once housed Eddie Griffin. The replication is deliberate and exact: the low ceiling, the brick-lined walls, the tables pressed against the stage and the iconic stained-glass sign glowing behind the microphone all reproduce the New York original, in a room seating around 250 to 300. So does the format that made the brand - no single headliner, but a showcase of five or more headline-calibre comics doing roughly twenty minutes each, with the nightly lineup deliberately unadvertised. As Grundfest told opening-week press, the club's founding promise still applies: come down, and if you don't have a good time, we'll give you your money back. The New York tradition of unannounced drop-ins crossed the country with it - Romano, Dave Attell and Jeff Ross all appeared unbilled in the first months, and stars playing elsewhere on the Strip treat the room as their late-night gym. Todd Barry, Michelle Wolf and the deep bench of Cellar regulars rotate through, and the Comedy Central series This Week at the Comedy Cellar boosted the brand's reach soon after the Vegas opening. In a city built on big-room residencies and production spectacle, the Cellar sells the opposite - a dark, intimate, comic-first showcase where the lineup is a matter of trust - and it has run full houses at the Rio ever since.

Type: Bar / Pub

Address: 3700 W Flamingo Rd, Las Vegas, NV, United States, 89103

Website: https://www.comedycellar.com

Minimum Age: 21

Capacity: 300

Opening Date: 01/04/2018

Serves Food

Accessible