Entertainment Diet: Mike Hammer
The research results are in. And, once again, comedy magician Mike Hammer has the cheapest full-priced show ticket in town. Does that mean he eats at McDonald’s, or Picasso?
Actually, neither. But Hammer does own a Tesla Model S, a hint as to which direction the needle points.
The Chicago native — whose dad really did give him the name of Mickey Spillane’s private eye — again was found to have the lowest full-priced ticket, $23, in the Las Vegas Advisor’s latest calculations of ticket prices; one that put the new average at $90.
“People come downtown for a bargain,” Hammer says of his six-year berth in the Canyon Club at the Four Queens. Though it’s now standard practice to list one’s ticket price at $56 and then discount to $23, “I just don’t play the game,” Hammer says.
And slowly but surely, he says, more people come based on word of mouth instead of price for his one-man magic show, which is full of insult-comedy interaction with the audience.
The 14-year Henderson resident shares his Entertainment Diet:
DINING
Hammer likes Hugo’s Cellar at the Four Queens, and not simply because it’s under the same roof as his show. Before the celebrity chef invasion, longtime Las Vegans remember the basement gourmet room as the place for prom night and marriage proposals. “It’s still classic Vegas dining,” Hammer says of the tuxedoed waiters and tableside salad service. Though beef dominates the menu, he’s partial to the Chilean sea bass.
Working downtown also means a lot of visitor and business-related dining at the freestanding and “very consistent” Triple George Grill, 201 N. Third St. Hammer is a seafood guy here as well, recommending the Atlantic salmon.
MOVIES
“I know this will sound cliche because everybody loved it, but ‘Deadpool’ was so good. It was so witty; the writing was amazing. Just the timing of the lines. Very sarcastic. Of course I loved that,” says the magician, who bases much of his stage banter on sarcasm as well.
Despite mixed reviews, Hammer also recommends giving the M. Night Shyamalan chiller “The Visit” a chance. “If you want to see bad things happen to kids, it’s great,” he says, again with the sarcasm thing.
TV
“They’re gonna think I’m a freak,” he says for recommending “Black Mirror,” a dark British satire (available on Netflix) that Hammer calls “ ‘The Twilight Zone’ for social media and modern technology.”
“It’s so weird. Very, very odd,” he says. In the first episode of the anthology series about tough choices, a member of the royal family is kidnapped and promised freedom only if the prime minister has sex with a pig, on national television.
“I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to be watching this,’ but you can’t stop.”
Closer to home, Hammer finished the second season of AMC’s “Better Call Saul” and then started watching its parent series, “Breaking Bad,” all over again. Why? Because this year’s “Saul” had “too much love story and not enough Mike,” the intense “fixer” played by Jonathan Banks.
BOOKS
“It’s gonna be all magic,” Hammer says with a laugh. Two books come to mind.
“Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear,” by magic historian and creator Jim Steinmeyer, is true to its title. “It’s basically about how Harry Houdini performed one single illusion people debated forever, making an elephant disappear. But it takes you through the whole history of that (turn-of-the-century) time. It’s amazing.”
And fellow Las Vegan Teller of Penn &Teller co-edited “House of Mystery: The Magic Science of David P. Abbott,” about the Nebraska magician and inventor “who really went to extreme lengths to fool people” in the 1910s and ’20s.
HANGOUTS
Hammer says he did the club thing “for years when I first got here” but now prefers “the laid-back atmosphere” of The Golden Tiki, 3939 Spring Mountain Road.
On Mondays he gathers with other local show folk and the “super-sweet people” who staff the Bootlegger Bistro, 7700 Las Vegas Blvd. South for Kelly Clinton’s long-running Open Mic Night.
He also tries to see Clinton’s husband, Clint Holmes, at his monthly Cabaret Jazz residency. And there happens to be another magician who works small venues and isn’t as famous as David Copperfield or Criss Angel.
He is Frederic Da Silva, and Hammer says he can recommend “Paranormal,” afternoons in the Windows Showroom at Bally’s, because Da Silva is both a mentalist and dead serious in his presentation, so no conflict there.
“I love mentalism, but I can’t do it downtown. Everything has to be simple,” he says.
Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow Mikeweatherford on Twitter.
