Vinnie Favorito, shown last summer at Binion's, has moved his off-the-cuff putdown humor to the tiny O'Sheas theater on the Strip. Photo by Ralph Fountain.

Vinnie Favorito is a comedian who is at his best when he's working the crowd, and a small crowd provides a more thorough workout.

If you think you can escape his scrutiny when you're lined up like sitting ducks in rows of theater seats, think again. And if he does perchance fail to mess with you, you feel left out.

The obscure 150-seat theater at O'Sheas -- once home to a museum of ventriloquism -- is Favorito's second attempt to move from comedy club regular to year-round headliner of a longform show.

The first was staged last year in a spacious ballroom at Binion's. It was dripping with old-Vegas atmosphere and a fitting match for Favorito's brand of latter-day Don Rickles put-down humor. Neither comedian ever met an ethnic stereotype he didn't like.

Just before Christmas, the Boston club veteran relaunched on the Strip -- again produced by Mac King associate Bill Voelkner -- in the casino annex to the Flamingo. "Now I'm workin' the attic of an Irish pub," he tells the crowd. "This is a dream come true right here. If the terrorists come back, they're not hitting this (expletive) building."

The room has all the atmosphere of the dinkiest screen of your local movie megaplex, though it did get a good cleaning and coat of paint for this venture. It's not the kind of place that jump-starts a festive, drinking mood. But the no-frills environment does lend credence to the show poster's subtitle: "Buckle Up."

Favorito does a few minutes of dispensable comedy club material: ATMs, driving in Los Angeles, $38 haircuts and the like. But the real fun is the high-wire act of watching him try to make it up on the spot as he spars with patrons.

When a serviceman tells him he flies to Iraq every month, Favorito replies, "What, you have a timeshare?"

A woman he's been ogling tells him, in a valley-girl drawl, that she plans to be a doctor. "Really? Not if you talk like that." He turns to the crowd and notes, "I shoulda not talked to her. I would have lived out the fantasy."

But Favorito doesn't come up with so many quotable one-liners as riffs that exist in the moment. He pries information out of people and ties one stranger to the next.

He slices through the cryptic, euphemistic job descriptions such as "food service." "Were you a cook? Were you a waiter? Were you the Hamburgler? ... You worked in a grocery store. Well (expletive) say that!"

When two guys upfront tell him they're friends because "we swam in college," you get the expected double-take and bombardment of gay jokes. Better, though, is how "swimmers" becomes a casual code word for "gay" for the rest of the show: "You look a little upset. Is it the swimmers?"

Like Rickles, however, a lot of it is shortcutting via racial humor: Single out an ethnicity and plug in the jokes. This means all Mexicans are lazy and all blacks are shifty badasses, unless they are named Warren: "That is the uncoolest black name I ever heard of."

It's all fine in Favorito's mind because he delivers it with a smile and because he is Italian, which means he can make Mafia jokes about himself. And when the lines elicit groans, he tells the crowd, "You suburban people gotta lighten up."

Not being one who is overburdened by political correctness, the stereotyping didn't offend me so much as set me to thinking back to Dave Chappelle's November show in Las Vegas. Instead of recycling the cliches, Chappelle upends the old stereotypes to mine them from a fresh perspective.

Favorito is too old-school for that. But unless this is just completely not your thing, you're likely to be too busy laughing at the other people -- or listening to them laugh at you -- to care.