Sebastian Maniscalco Atlantic City Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Sebastian Maniscalco in Atlantic City — FAQ

About Sebastian Maniscalco

Sebastian Maniscalco was born July 8, 1973 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a working-class northwest suburb of Chicago, the son of Italian immigrants — his father Salvatore emigrated from Cefalù in Sicily and ran a hair salon, his mother Rose worked as a beautician — and the family detail is load-bearing across the act. The Italian-American immigrant childhood, the father in particular, the wedding banquets, the cousins, the table manners, and the increasingly bewildered observations about how the rest of America behaves in public are the canonical Maniscalco material that anchors every special. He graduated from Rolling Meadows High School and Northern Illinois University with a degree in corporate communications, moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to chase stand-up, and spent roughly a decade working as a waiter at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills while grinding open mics, club spots, and the LA Improv and Comedy Store circuit at night. He has talked openly in interviews about that period as the formative one — observing the wealthy hotel clientele, banking the material, watching the room — and the act on stage carries the residue of those years in its precision about etiquette, gesture, and the small absurdities of how people present themselves. The break came slowly: a regular spot on Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show tour and the 2006 documentary that followed it, an early Showtime hour, then his first one-hour special Sebastian Live in 2009. Aren't You Embarrassed? followed in 2014 on Showtime, Why Would You Do That? in 2016, Stay Hungry on Netflix in 2019, Is It Me? on Netflix in 2022, and It Ain't Right on Netflix in 2024 — a special-every-two-or-three-years cadence that has kept the act in front of a national streaming audience while the touring scaled up underneath. The film and television work expanded in parallel: a supporting role as nightclub owner Johnny Venere in the 2018 best-picture winner Green Book, Joe Gallo in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019), the lead in About My Father (2023) opposite Robert De Niro in a story loosely based on his own father and his proposal to his wife Lana, hosting duties at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards, and recurring podcast and late-night appearances on the major network shows. He married Lana Gomez, an artist, in 2013, and the couple have two children — material that has gradually worked its way into the recent specials as the act has aged into the family-life chapter. The voice on stage is physical and theatrical in a way most stand-up is not — the body is part of the act, the long takes, the deliberate pauses, the precision mimicry of small gestures, the wedding-toast pacing — and the writing is observational, character-driven, and deliberately PG-13 in a comedy market that has drifted in the other direction. The result is a touring number that crosses generations: parents and grandparents in the room, adult children in the next section, the rare arena comic whose audience genuinely spans from late teens through retirement.

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