No vision board, no grand plan, no dreams of greatness.
The only thing comedian Sebastian Maniscalco really knew when he came to Los Angeles from the suburbs of Illinois 26 years ago was that he wanted to make people laugh and hopefully make some money doing it, at least enough to live on and keep his Italian family off his back about the dubious career choice of pursuing stand-up comedy. Waiting tables at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills was his main prospect after showing up to L.A. in March 1998, along with getting stand-up gigs whenever and wherever he could.
Since then a lot has changed. As he strides through the underground labyrinth in the hull of the $2-billion, spacecraft-looking Intuit Dome — wearing snug black jeans; a heavily starched, leopard-print jacket; and perfectly coiffed silver hair — you’d think he owns the place. OK, so he doesn’t quite have Steve Ballmer money just yet, but when it comes to Inglewood’s newest arena, he most certainly owns a piece of its history as the first comedian ever to perform at the arena on Aug. 17.
“If you would have told young me, ‘Hey, in 2024, just so you know, you’re going to be performing where the Clippers play basketball in an arena,’ I couldn’t comprehend it,” he said, sitting back on a white leather couch in a dressing room. “Back then that felt like something, fame was never in the cards for me.”
A man without too many lofty aspirations, he attributes his continued success, almost three decades in, to ignoring the glitz and staying focused on the grit of getting through life.
“Am I surprised that I’m doing this? I mean, I don’t know. I just feel like I’ve worked so hard at what I do, and people seem to enjoy it. The fact that, you know, they want to come see me in an arena like this is flattering,” he said. “Quite honestly, I don’t know if it’s even really kind of hit me yet. Anytime I do anything, I just think, Where am I working tonight? I’m working at the Comedy Store tonight, and I’m working at the Intuit Dome Aug.17. I just feel like it’s just, you know, going to work.”
Whether you count his six comedy specials, time on the big screen with Robert De Niro in Maniscalco’s semi-autobiographical comedy “About My Father,” starring in the HBO/Max series “Bookie” or being among the highest-grossing touring comedians in the country (he sold out Madison Square Garden a record-breaking five times in a row this year), there are few boxes denoting a successful career that Maniscalco hasn’t checked off.
On a recent afternoon inside one of the many dressing rooms inside Intuit Dome, Maniscalco’s calm and cool demeanor as he poses for photos is substantially subdued compared with his onstage persona of an eternally vexed Italian dad with cartoonish expressions and full-body comedic convulsions. Yes, in most respects he is very much the guy people see in his specials, but a less bullish, more thoughtful version when he’s not cracking jokes. As much of a character as he might be when calling out the embarrassing behavior of modern society, he knows his super power is relating to people and getting them to forget about their problems while he’s performing.
“I just want people to say that I never disappointed them at a show. That’s kind of what’s most important to me,” he said. “You come to my show and for an hour and a half, you’re going to forget that your mother’s dying, you’re going to forget that you were just told that you have high blood pressure. My goal is when you come here and watch comedy and forget about all those things … it’s like medicine.”
Days after his 51st birthday last month, Maniscalco kicked off his national “It Ain’t Right” tour with a new set he says is about catching his fans up with his life as an older father of two young kids (a 5-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter) and the pitfalls and parallels of life as a professional funnyman as well as a dad. It’s the type of comedy he barely has time to rehearse because he’s too busy living it. But while some comics thrive on the mundane life events of shopping for groceries or going to the mall or picking the kids up from soccer practice, Maniscalco’s career no longer gives him much time to live those things. Instead, it’s more about the things he misses while on the road.
“I went to a water slide party yesterday with my kids and my wife, and I realized how I’m not part of the dad crew because I’m out of town a lot,” he said. “Meanwhile, they’ve been hanging out for three years. I felt like it was my first day at high school trying to find a friend.”
Family has always been central to his comedy and inescapable when you consider his Italian roots. The bulk of Maniscalco’s most recognizable bits revolve around stories about his hairdresser father, Salvo, whose no-nonsense immigrant wisdom is exported from the old country. The bond he has with his father, which inspired his film “About My Father,” co-starring De Niro as his dad, inspires his role in the lives of his own kids, even as a celebrity who didn’t start having kids with his wife, multimedia artist Lana Gomez, until he was 43.
“Looking back, everything happens for a reason the way it should,” Maniscalco said. “But yeah, I wish I would have started [having kids] a little earlier, just because, you know, you start looking at your life, going, OK, my kid’s 5, I’m 50 — I’m almost double the difference between my father and I. And you start to think, am I going to be around for this kid when he gets married at 35. He might be changing my diaper on his wedding day.”
Life for Maniscalco is a constant balancing act between trying to be a good father and husband and also pushing his career in Hollywood forward. The two goals are often at odds, as any famous parent can attest, especially as Maniscalco continues venturing into Hollywood to earn his stripes as an actor, even if it means being open to a little danger.
The comedian recently signed on to do a ride-along with the Los Angeles Police Department in downtown L.A. in preparation for an upcoming role.
“Right away I have an opinion on that,” he said. “My luck is I’m going to be on the ride-along and s— is going to go down and they’re going to go, ‘We need help, get out of car,’” he says, laughing. “So already I’m setting myself up for [stand-up material] that kind of feeds into that. This is my luck, and this will happen. … I bring this type of energy or luck to the situation.”
Even in more glamorous surroundings, Maniscalco can’t help but be the guy everything always happens to. On the new tour, he’s working out a joke about a hellish experience at last year’s Oscars, falling down what he said felt like 33 flights of stairs while wearing his tuxedo.
Though the perils of star-studded award shows might not resonate with his blue-collar fan base, Maniscalco finds a way to take himself down to bring other people’s spirits up as the hapless character at the center of a (slightly judgy) everyman story. The hope is to keep finding ways to improve even while at the top of his game. Whether it’s the love of success or just the fear of failure that motivates greatness (Maniscalco says it’s mostly the latter), there is no better testing ground to prove one’s mettle than on stage alone in front of a crowd.
“Everybody’s trying to do it at different levels, and when you get down to the core of it all, I think you have to embrace that fear,” he said. “Because as a comedian, you’re up there spilling your soul to these strangers. I think it’s part of what makes the connection between you and the fans grow deeper. That’s kind of the beauty of going up there.”
The arrival of his arena-status level of touring has brought with it the need to deliver on more than just jokes. For Maniscalco, that means putting on a show from the moment he touches the stage. “I’m a huge fan of showmanship back in the ’80s — Prince, Mötley Crüe, Michael Jackson — these are all music acts, but there’s an element of production and excitement, and I just want to kind of re-create some of that by doing some things that might not be traditional in the world of comedy,” he said.
Before the Intuit Dome show, he said, he and his team have been working on ways to bring a unique comedy performance to the 18,000-seater that sits in a constellation of major venues including the Kia Forum, SoFi Stadium and the YouTube Theater. In an era when the arena-fication of comedy is common, finding ways to make a stand-up show stand out is another part of the craft for the comics at the top of the game. “I even need to figure out things like how do I get from the back of the house to the stage? How do I make an entrance? Then of course I have to be funny, or else no one in the arena gives a crap how I got there.”
Despite all the ways comics can blow up on social media, Maniscalco says he still puts most of his energy on his live show, which he says is a better use of his time at this stage than worrying about boosting his profile on TikTok or Instagram. As with most other things that have to do with his comedy, the best strategy is not to try too hard to figure out what people want and give them what you think is good — often the comic gets pleasantly surprised at the response.
One recent video he posted after pointing out Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed, who came to one of his shows, and telling the singer about how “With Arms Wide Open” made him cry on his way home from Vegas went viral, garnering over 12 million views.
“I just put it up as like a fun stupid video not thinking it was going nuts,” he said. “Rather than trying to figure out how do I get in the algorithm or what do kids want to see? What’s the younger generation looking for? I just do what I do, and if you like it, great. If not, that’s fine too…If you just do what you think is funny, I think people will relate.”
The tenets of comfort-food comedy continue to serve Maniscalco’s career like a hearty bowl of pasta — though he says most days he prefers a good steak. Right now his main comfort with life on the road has been taking his entire family with him on tour for the first time. With his wife and kids in tow, despite all the jokes about what’s wrong with the world, things still feel as right as they’ve ever been.
“This tour kind of has a little bit more meaning to me in the sense that for the first time in my life, I’m sharing what I do with my my entire family, particularly my kids, because now they kind of are aware of what Daddy does for a living, he makes people laugh,” he said, with a prideful grin. “I don’t know if I’m going to be doing Intuit Dome in two years. … I could be back at a theater or a comedy club, who knows. So to enjoy this tour with my family is really important to me.”
