On August 1, 2023, comic and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel writer Noah Gardenswartz moved with his comedian wife Ester Steinberg and their two young children from Los Angeles to Summerlin. Just shy of three months later, Gardenswartz, now 40, released the YouTube special Sweatpants in Perpetuity.
Returning as a headliner at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club on the Las Vegas Strip this week, Gardenswartz spoke with the Weekly about the move and what it’s like for a comedian couple to be living “across the street from a Costco and a Lifetime Fitness.”
What were the circumstances in your moving to Las Vegas?
All the work that I was getting was either on the road as a comic or could be done over Zoom. It was starting to make less sense why I needed to be in LA. When the writers’ strike happened, that was kind of the final straw, as we were deciding whether or not to renew our lease. Why am I paying so much money to rent in a city where it seems like I’m never going to be able to afford to buy a house, where I don’t even need to be to work? Where is it affordable, we can find a school we like for our children, and you can also be a professional entertainer? Our shortlist basically came down to Atlanta and Las Vegas, and we came and visited Las Vegas. It actually happened that the very first headline weekend I got at Jimmy Kimmel’s was in April as we were deciding. So it was almost serendipitous, where I had a week to go test the waters of Vegas as we were figuring out what we were going to do.
Has the local scene grown to accommodate more numbers of professional comedians?
There are, to the best of my knowledge, I think six full-time comedy clubs in Vegas, one of which has two locations. Headline weeks are Monday through Sunday, or at least they’re running shows all seven nights a week. Then on top of that, probably half a dozen hotels have theater shows where you have major headliners from New York and LA constantly coming in, a lot of which we’re friends with and you can be an opener for. So there’s just a ton of high-level paid work.
Even in the 10 months I’ve been here, I’m seeing more comedians getting better and trying to run independent rooms or do a bar show. Suddenly there is a little bit more of an independent scene growing.
What’s good about Vegas is it does feel like a road gig. When you do a road gig, mostly everyone is from that city and the crowds take on the personality of that town. In Vegas, it’s people from all over the country, all over the world traveling here for the weekend. Instead of doing 30 cities to test your material, you have 30 different audiences coming in one night. It’s like you can condense an entire tour’s worth of experiences. Red audiences, blue audiences, old, young, rich, poor; they’re all here, and they’re all at the same show.
NOAH GARDENSWARTZ June 7-8, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., $44+, Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club, ticketmaster.com.
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