Sebastian Maniscalco is a stand-up comedian at heart,
with five full-length specials, a memoir, and many memorable TV appearances.
You wouldn't know it from Maniscalco's appearance in The Irishman, though.
In Martin Scorsese's gangland epic, Maniscalco plays real-life gangster "Crazy" Joe Gallo,
one of the most colorful characters in the history of organized crime.
Maniscalco perfectly captures all of Gallo's swaggering, flamboyant energy.
One of his best scenes in the film comes when Gallo meets
Frank Sheeran and Russell Bufalino at New York's famous Copacabana.
Gallo, who's celebrating his birthday, stops by Sheeran and Bufalino's table to say hello.
It doesn't go well. First, Gallo makes fun of Bufalino's Italian-American Civil
Rights League pin. When Sheeran tries to defuse the situation, Gallo takes offense,
and the brief but memorable scene sees Maniscalco going head-to-head with Robert De Niro.
"You can't say that stuff like that here. Okay? You can't do that."
"Why not? Rickles is the only one who can make jokes?"
"The man's a boss."
"So I'm a boss. He's a boss. We're all supposed to be brothers, right?"
"I know you're a boss. I know, but we don't want to have a beef now, okay?"
"We're brothers, right?"
"That's right, brothers."
"We're brothers?"
"You're brothers."
"We're brothers."
"I'm not arguing with you. Everybody's a brother. That's right. You're a brother. You're
his brother. I'm not, but you guys are. So that's why I would like it if you just...Alright. Okay."
"We're brothers."
"You're brothers."
As an actor, Maniscalco can hang with the best of the best. Not that anyone
who's been following his career should be surprised, of course.
Sebastian Maniscalco has been working as a stand-up since 1998, and in addition to
his sold-out comedy shows, national tours, and TV specials, he's performed on virtually every
late-night talk show, guested on Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and even hosted
the MTV Video Music Awards. By this point, Maniscalco is a polished and precise comedian.
"Like when you leave here tonight, if you're low on gas, you pull into a weird neighborhood
you don't know, you gotta be on high alert. Soon as you get out of the car, you gotta
ask yourself, where's the murder coming from tonight?"
It's that sense of physical timing that made him so attractive to The Irishman's producers.
Producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff told Variety.
"We loved Sebastian as a comedian and knew that he had impeccable timing from his standup routines,
which can translate really well into drama as well."
In The Irishman, you can see exactly what Koskoff means.
Gallo is a big personality, and while he's dangerous, he's also quite funny.
"Mr. Gallo, do you have an opening statement?"
"Yeah...this carpet would be great for a crap game."
In the scene at the Copacabana, though, Maniscalco takes things even further.
His back-and-forth with De Niro has the rhythm of a comedy routine. At the end,
it becomes a kind of threat, implying that Gallo is untouchable, at least to someone like Sheeran.
"It's my birthday."
"Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday."
However, none of this subtext in the dialogue itself. It's all in Maniscalco's delivery,
and proves just how perfectly calibrated his use of language really is.
While Sebastian Maniscalco's stand-up relies on quite a bit of observational humor,
much of his genius lies not in what he's saying, but how he's saying it.
Maniscalco is famous for his physicality.
As it turns out, that physical element is a big boon to his work as a dramatic performer, too.
"I work Gypsies. I work Italians. Well,
not those Italians. No, no, no, no. It's okay, Joey. I got the money. Don't shoot."
All of Gallo's mannerisms would be right at home in one of Maniscalco's comedy sets.
Like Maniscalco's stage persona, Gallo is a
larger-than-life character who's incredibly memorable, despite his brief screen time.
In many ways, it's not too surprising that Sebastian Maniscalco landed a role as a gangster
in a Martin Scorsese mafia epic. Maniscalco's Italian heritage is a big part of his act.
"She thinks I've got a mean resting face. Like if I'm not talking or smiling,
it looks like I could murder your entire family."
Still, it's one thing to play a mobster. It's another to play one opposite Robert De Niro and
Joe Pesci, two of the best ever to do it. And yet, Maniscalco manages to match both of them
in terms of presence, humor, and ferocity. Maniscalco has said that he was incredibly
nervous before he shot the scene, but it doesn't show on-screen. Gallo is cocky, patronizing,
and dangerous, and never feels like anything less than a real threat to Frank and Russell.
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