There’s no love, but it keeps calling

You will never see a comedian on a Vegas stage quite like George Carlin. Unlike other veteran performers, Carlin, 70, doesn’t bother with the greatest hits here: not the baseball versus football bit, and nothing about the words you can’t say on the air. Instead, on his opening night at the Orleans, like a professor, Carlin had a table stacked with notes on his latest incest joke or giggle over kiddie porn that he kept consulting to get the wording exactly right. As a result, a few people walked out early.

Carlin has been fired from more than one hotel in Las Vegas. According to the comedian, when the MGM tossed him a few years ago, they claimed his act had become “too dark.” Carlin confesses: “My history in Vegas is checkered, mixed and scarred.” After MGM, he was briefly at the Stardust and then seemed to have quit Vegas for good until this month’s stint at the Orleans, which runs through tonight (he returns Sept. 20 through 23). Carlin had considered giving up Sin City, but it’s proved just too tempting:

“Las Vegas provides something for me. In other places like Pittsburgh you can sell out two nights in nice-sized halls and you get the hard-core George Carlin fans. But then, to be crass, you need to give the market a rest for a couple of years,” he explained before the show. “The same is true of Dallas and Portland and Seattle or wherever. But for a person who develops the material out there on the stage into these more permanent forms like DVD, it is necessary for me to get the exercise on-stage. So Las Vegas provides an easy place to go where the audience keeps changing. You don’t tap it out.

“But the price I pay for that is the audiences are not the best in Vegas. In Pittsburgh, I get the hard-core fans who know what I am about. In Las Vegas, often I get people who saw me on ‘Leno’ or got a coupon. It doesn’t work easily.”

So why is George Carlin back in Vegas facing yet another tad-too-conservative Las Vegas audience? He’s taping his next HBO special in February and wants to be ready. Next month, celebrating his 50th year in show business, sees the release of a 14-disc collection of his dozen earlier HBO shows: “George Carlin: All My Stuff.”

And while it is true a few people walked out on a recent Friday night, most stayed and gave him a standing ovation. Because after all these years of show business, people, even in Vegas, know what to expect from George Carlin.

A club-hopper’s dream scene

If there has ever been a symbol of how swiftly the Vegas nightclub world keeps developing and changing, look to Labor Day weekend, which marks something of a peak. The biggest event, of course, is going to be the grand opening of the Vegas version of Hollywood’s LAX at the Luxor. Thanks no doubt to Britney Spears doing nothing but grabbing negative headlines since she signed on to host the event, the LAX opening has dominated local news and been heavily promoted for weeks.

But just as telling, LAX’s Vegas owner, Pure Management Group, is also holding a closeout weekend celebration for its successful nightclub Tangerine at TI, this one hosted by Dave Navarro. Though only 3 years old, sources connected to the club say Tangerine has proven much more successful than anticipated, and the club scene in Vegas has grown so much in the last few years that it is time to reinvest in the property. And while that may seem self-serving, Tangerine isn’t being replaced by a showroom or slots but by another (yet to be named) nightclub -- one that plans to be set up and ready in time for a grand opening on New Year’s Eve.

Finally, the same night LAX opens at Luxor, Wynn is opening its latest nightclub, Blush. It may seem foolish to open Blush on this date, but managing partner Sean Christie says: “To tell you the truth, we are already totally booked for our opening weekend: Friday, Saturday and Sunday.” After Blush, what next?

Palm Springs take note, tourist-wise

According to Las Vegas journalist Steve Friess, “something dramatic has happened in the last five years in the way the Las Vegas tourism establishment views the gay market as a great market.” Having ignored gay travelers for much of the ‘90s, these days, Friess points out, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority sponsors a float in New York’s annual gay pride parade. “The major casino companies, particularly the Wynn, Harrah’s and MGM, seem in a competition now as to who can appear to be more gay-friendly,” he says.

So Friess (a journalist who writes about Vegas for the New York Times, Newsweek and USA Today) has just published the first Vegas guidebook aimed at gay tourists: “Gay Vegas: A Guide to the Other Side of Sin City.” “When Las Vegas started going for the high-end market by bringing in high-end shopping in a big way and amazing restaurants in a big way, it opened up a whole other destination for travelers like gay people who gravitate toward the finer things and real culture,” said Friess, a member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Assn. “This allowed Vegas to compete for the first time for gay travelers with cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

Among other things, Friess recommends a quick visit to the Flamingo’s Wildlife Habitat, which is home to a couple of devoted male pink flamingos, Bubblegum and Pink Floyd, and an African penguin, Turnip, whose gender, Friess says, has never been determined.

--

For more of what’s happening on and off the Strip, go to latimes.com/movablebuffet.