{"id":4343,"date":"2022-03-09T12:45:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-09T17:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/?p=4343"},"modified":"2022-03-09T13:15:50","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T18:15:50","slug":"exclusive-interview-with-comedian-sebastian-maniscalco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/2022\/03\/09\/exclusive-interview-with-comedian-sebastian-maniscalco\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive Interview with Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tour stops in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto March 17 through 19<\/a><\/strong><\/p>

by Adam Zara<\/em><\/p>

Panoram Italia:<\/a><\/em> The name of your latest comedy tour is \u201cNobody Does This<\/a>\u201d. We can just picture you saying this to your wife or parents with your trademark sense of shame and embarrassment. How vital of a role does your family play when preparing a new comedy special or tour?<\/strong><\/p>

Sebastian Maniscalco: <\/strong>I kind of made my bones talking about my family throughout my career, especially my father. So that\u2019s been kind of the cornerstone of my act. Sometimes I talk about how I grew up and how my father raised me and now my act has kind of switched to how I\u2019m raising my kids. Family plays a huge, huge role in what I do up there on stage and I think it\u2019s very relatable because people, especially in the Italian community, are very family oriented. They kind of grew up the same way, but you don\u2019t have to be Italian to understand the material. The root of it comes from the Italian upbringing, especially places in the world who have large groups of Italians; I tend to do really well in Boston, New York, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto.<\/p>

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PI: Your Sicilian dad has always been an essential figure in your comedy. He\u2019s a hair stylist. You once told a story on a late night TV show\u2014and I believe it was Conen\u2014where you caught him selling your book at his hair salon and he personally signed the books. Did he style your hair growing up? And if not, how did that conversation go, if you had it?<\/strong><\/p>

SM: <\/strong>He actually came to a book signing in Chicago and I was signing books, there was a long line. I noticed as I was signing the books, it was already signed and I\u2019m like \u201cwhat\u2019s going on?\u201d My father was signing the books as well, but he was signing them on the other end of the bookstore. My dad had his own line! He\u2019s definitely a character in his own right. He did cut my hair growing up, until I was like 24 years old, when I left home, and he had cut it when he came out here two years ago and I noticed that his skills are slipping in his old age, so I said: \u201cit\u2019s the last time you\u2019re cutting my hair, the back of my hair is a crooked line.\u201d He\u2019s 75 and he\u2019s still working, he\u2019s still at it. He\u2019s falling apart at the seams: his shoulders are shot, but he\u2019s going to die behind the chair, he just doesn\u2019t retire. I told him: \u201cDad, it\u2019s over bro. You\u2019re 75. This is like a young person\u2019s business. They\u2019re not going to walk into a salon and choose the senior citizen to do their hair.\u201d But God bless him, he loves it, he loves the women there. Everyone loves my father in the salon. I think he likes it as a social outlet.<\/p>

PI: Touching on the feature comedy you filmed last year called \u201cAbout my father,\u201d could you ever have imagined\u2014and I know this is a rhetorical question\u2014working so closely with Robert De Niro and what has it done to your dad\u2019s ego to have this legend play him in a movie role?<\/strong><\/p>

SM: <\/strong>Well of course, my dad\u2019s upped his prices now because De Niro was playing him in a movie. I never would have thought this was even a possibility, I mean this is a guy\u2014De Niro\u2014that I watched growing up\u2014Casino, Goodfellas, The Godfather<\/em>\u2014next thing you know, he\u2019s calling up my father and asking my dad \u201cwould you say this?\u201d, \u201chow would you say that?\u201d so my dad was like a consultant on the movie. De Niro wanted him on set because there was going to be a salon scene and De Niro was going to be doing a dye job and my dad was teaching De Niro how to do a dye job on the set. Of course, my dad\u2019s asking me on the side how much he\u2019s getting paid for this, \u201chow much am I getting paid for being a consultant?\u201d This is a movie with Robert De Niro, what do you mean pay? He was losing money at the salon to be here so he was worried about compensation. De Niro wanted him to stay for the whole shoot, my dad was like \u201cwhat stay for the whole shoot?! I gotta get back, I\u2019m gonna lose clients!\u201d He loved it; he was on cloud nine. He didn\u2019t believe this was even going to happen; I told my dad De Niro was going to do the movie and my dad was like \u201cyeah, right, I\u2019ll believe it when I see it.\u201d We shot it in Alabama for six weeks and it was surreal seeing De Niro playing my dad in a movie. I saw the movie for the first time with a test audience last week to see what they liked, what they disliked. It was really cool to see 400 people laughing at the movie we made. I think it\u2019s going to resonate with a lot of people; it\u2019ll make you laugh and make you cry at the same time.<\/p>

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PI: How important is Italian culture in your daily life and is it important for you to pass it on to your children? <\/strong><\/p>

SM: <\/strong>Unfortunately, growing up, we kind of grew up more Americanized than Italian. We didn\u2019t speak Italian around the house which is unfortunate; I get a lot of crap for it, particularly from my dad. My dad is like \u201cit\u2019s my fault, I should have taught you how to speak Italian.\u201d And my mom was afraid that if they taught me how to speak Italian I wouldn\u2019t learn English. But we grew up hanging out at my grandparents\u2019 house who didn\u2019t speak a word of English and we grew up with those old world values and morals that they brought from Sicily\u2014my dad moved when he was 15 years old, he spent his childhood there. Now that I have a family, I definitely stress the importance of learning the language and embracing the culture. My 4.5 year old takes Italian class and my son\u2014he\u2019s 2.5 years old\u2014we got him a little bear, Giovanni, that speaks Italian. He\u2019s just basically repeating everything the bear says. That was the one thing missing, really grasping the language like I should have. When we go to Italy now, once I get immersed in the culture, it all comes back (I took Italian in high school for two years). My dad thinks he knows Italian but he really doesn\u2019t. He speaks Sicilian but I don\u2019t even think he knows how to speak Sicilian! We went to Italy in 2009 for the first time, both of us together, and we went back to his hometown in Cefal\u00f9. He was nervous to speak Sicilian because he was not confident, but once he started, he was off to the races. Long answer cut short: Italian is definitely an important thing in our family.<\/p>

PI: Because you\u2019re famous for making observations, is there anything about Italian culture or Italians in general that you dislike?<\/strong><\/p>

SM: <\/strong>I don\u2019t know if this is specific to the Italian community, but I know it\u2019s specific to our family. There\u2019s just a lot of negativity. In a day and age where you turn on Instagram or TikTok and everyone\u2019s doing these inspirational [things] like \u201cbe positive!\u201d I grew up with negativity, like the world\u2019s ending. It\u2019s gotta be an Italian thing because lot of people I speak to that come from Italian families, the parents weren\u2019t sitting there going \u201ceverything gonna be okay (in an Italian accent)!\u201d It was quite the opposite, like the world\u2019s ending. Even to this day, my dad\u2019s like \u201csave your money, you never know! Your tongue could fall out tomorrow!\u201d Like what? It\u2019s never like we\u2019re going to build on what we made, it\u2019s always like it\u2019s going to end soon. Maybe the negativity is one of the things I noticed is a little tougher in the Italian community.<\/p>

PI: You performed at the Just For Laughs Festival many times throughout your career. Can you talk about what the festival means to you?<\/strong><\/p>

SM: <\/strong>My experience getting into the festival was through The Ethnic Show, The Relationship Show. Each year I went, I noticed that I would gain a little more of a following; it was small steps for me. But the Montreal comedy festival definitely laid a foundation for me in Canada to excel and, ultimately, start selling out these arenas. Also, the Festival, for me, is great because it\u2019s a time where you get to see a lot of comedians that you haven\u2019t seen. You get to go out and have a beer, which is not typical because all of us are touring, so it brings a lot of comedians together that you don\u2019t see during the year. It\u2019s unfortunate that it hasn\u2019t gone on in the last 2 years because of the pandemic but hopefully once it fires back up again, it\u2019ll pick up where it left off. <\/p>

Sebastian Maniscalco\u2019s \u201cNobody Does This\u201d tour stops in Ottawa on March 17, Montreal on March 18, and Toronto on March 19.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>

Click here for tickets<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tour stops in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto March 17 through 19 by Adam Zara Panoram Italia: The name of your latest comedy tour is \u201cNobody Does This\u201d. We can just…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[777,761],"class_list":{"0":"post-4343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-nobody-does-this","9":"tag-sebastian-maniscalco"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/SM22_1080x1080_SM-1-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4343"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4354,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4343\/revisions\/4354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}