At some point, Gordie Brown became last impressionist standing

Hey, wait. At what point did Gordie Brown become one of our only old-school Las Vegas showmen?

Over the years there's always been another impressionist to compare him to. He was the Looney Tunes, comedy club-style mimic, while Danny Gans was the sincere, accurate one. Or Brown was the younger, manic alternative to his stodgy mentor and fellow Canadian, Rich Little.

And if you moved beyond the strict definition of impressionists to include other break-a-sweat entertainers, it always seemed Clint Holmes or the Scintas were competing for your Gordie Brown ticket dollar, too.

But now? If scarcity makes something more valuable, the impressionist's six-year run is even more impressive at the Golden Nugget, where he has rolled up more than 1,760 shows.

Maybe you landed here on a week when Donny and Marie Osmond are in town. And puppets or no, ventriloquist Terry Fator is squarely of the same variety tradition. And Little is even back for limited run at the Tropicana.

But Brown is a consistent go-to guy at the Nugget, and one of the best ongoing deals in town: The show and a dinner buffet for $35 (before taxes and fees).

This is bound to generate repeat business, and one of the good things about Brown's act is that it doesn't feel nailed down. He slips new things in between the "greatest hits" and leaves himself a little room to riff.

A signature trait that can be both genius and irritating — often at the same time — is going so far out on a tangent it seems he's the only one in the room still keeping up with oddly funny non sequiturs. Like having Ray Charles mumble "I left a hundred dollars on the dresser. Put it toward the telethon."

And while he drops in a valid quip about how Botox is making it hard to wrinkle his upper forehead, Brown in his early 50s can still throw himself into the body language of an Elvis or Robin Williams bit.

He also lands right in the middle of his demographic targets. Baby boomers get dope jokes about Willie Nelson and Neil Young. A burst of '90s nostalgia gives nods to Tracy Chapman and Barenaked Ladies. A Green Day song rolls it into Generation X.

Any stray millennials or younger will have to settle for an opening shot of Pharrell Williams' "Happy" with the five-piece band, or very occasional nods to movie or TV actors they may know (Owen Wilson). Otherwise, it's up to whether such stock-in-trade voices as Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood, Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken had enough grumpy-old-man work in their senior years to recognize.

Brown does suffers what seems to be a common malady among Las Vegas impressionists: Not getting to the movies much since "Forrest Gump" and "Rain Man" came out. He does a little better with music.

In fact, there's one bit it seems he was put on this Earth to do, much the way Fator is the one man who can put Etta James' voice into a little-girl puppet. As the bridge between their generations, Brown has Alan Thicke introducing son Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines."

But then it goes a step further, using Brown's knack for Mad magazine song parodies to turn the tune into another generational riff, between Miley Cyrus and father Billy Ray, and how Miley's 2013 twerk-a-thon at the Video Music Awards turned a "good girl" into a "call girl."

So at the beginning, I called the impressionist "old school." There's still a very casino-entertainment vibe about the whole 65 minutes, from Brown shedding his tie at just the right point in the act to the way he walks down into the audience and homes right in on the Long Island couple that's been married 44 years.

And yet, while it would be going too far the other direction to call him present-tense, one could argue the biggest "impressionist" in America today is "Tonight Show" host Jimmy Fallon and that Brown comes off much more like Fallon than Little.

If not old school, then maybe, "only as slightly dated as a veteran showman working a buffet-combo crowd in a town that changed so quickly around him that nobody even knows what works now can be"?

OK, then, old school it is.

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjounal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.