Theo Von brings his Southern charm and spontaneous stories to Las Vegas

Covington, La., had two famous residents before Theo Von rose to the top of comedy mountain. He’ll mention legendary floppy-socked New Orleans Jazz shooting guard “Pistol” Pete Maravich and former first-grader Lee Harvey Oswald while performing stand-up, but quickly pushes them out of audience members’ consciousnesses when he segues into stories drawn from his Covington years.

Theodor Capitani von Kurnatowski’s Southern-fried observances on culture and terms and phrases sound spontaneous, but may have been stationed for some length of time in his mind waiting for a call to arms. The gerbils he sold for $20 in parking lots to ravers and concertgoers were “warm, furry, living, lively little eclairs of The Lord.” The term for the manhood challenge that was OK done in pairs (but not with a group in a circle) is too offensive to print.

The mullet-sporting satirist, who co-stars with Johnny Knoxville and his buddy Bobby Lee in recently released recovery-meets-softball comedy Sweet Dreams, has one of the most popular podcasts in the stand-up sphere. He has a wider range of guests on This Past Weekend than his peers, ranging from MMA fighters to country music artists, from investigative journalists to a school lunch lady from Columbus, Ohio.

Youthful-looking Von, 44, began appearing on reality shows such as Road Rules: Maximum Velocity Tour while a teenaged LSU student. He went west to penetrate the stand-up scene and set himself apart with an authentic Southern persona, a raconteur who always has tales about his buddies at the ready.

There are precedents for Von’s approach. Comedian and poker genius Gabe Kaplan turned stories about his youth into a successful stand-up set, parlaying it into ’70s sitcom series Welcome Back, Kotter.

The standup-to-sitcom pipeline has largely dried up, but Von’s stories serve him well in the podcasting industry. He’s popular as a guest, co-hosted King and The Sting with Brendan Schaub and reached 500 episodes of This Past Weekend in May with an episode featuring musician and fellow Southerner Zac Brown.

Sometimes he skips guests altogether and just wings it solo. Von is one of the few comedians that can hold his own for an entire podcast episode. Tim Dillon is king of that niche, and Bill Burr can amuse himself for extended periods of time, but Von is in a class by himself. Tangents lead to other tangents that somehow lead back to the original thought, which might have been about how male chickens are entering coops to lay eggs, which is a sign that all of society is merging into … what?

Von’s not sure, but he enjoys following the thought processes involved in conceiving of such concepts. Sometimes he seems impressed by his own thoughts, which come so fast he needs to release them on other podcasts, which makes him in-demand as a guest for the crab bucket of podcasters crawling over each other trying to reach the top. Von is already there.

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