With a string of record-breaking, sold-out arena and theatre shows; a best-selling memoir, Stay Hungry; and a role in Green Book, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, it’s no surprise that Billboard honored him with their inaugural “Comedian of the Year” award.
The man Jerry Seinfeld calls “my favorite comedian” was one of Pollstar’s top 30 highest-grossing performers in the world, and was nominated for that publication’s Comedy Tour of the Year award. He sold out five shows at Radio City Music Hall, and the latest in Maniscalco’s five television comedy specials (for Netflix, Showtime, and Comedy Central) scaled new rating heights, prompting NBC Nightly News to describe him as “comedy’s new superstar.”
But “Stay Hungry” is more than just a slogan for the Chicago-born Maniscalco—it’s a way of life. And so in 2019, the man dubbed “the comedian’s comedian” by People magazine shows no sign of slowing down. The same week in January that his Netflix original special, Stay Hungry, was released, he performed an astonishing four sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, breaking the record for highest-grossing comedy event ever in North America. The year will also see Maniscalco’s performance—alongside Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci—in Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated The Irishman on Netflix. All this in addition to the main event, the launch of a brand-new tour titled “You Bother Me.”
Named one of the Top 10 highest-grossing comedians in the world in both 2017 and 2018 by Forbes, Maniscalco has taken full advantage of this new platform. “With the success of the comedy, other opportunities opened themselves up,” he says. “I’m able to take on projects I’m passionate about, just do really quality stuff—I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can really calculate what I’m doing and not spread myself too thin.”
But the biggest focus for Sebastian Maniscalco in 2019 will be the launch of the “You Bother Me” tour in September. “I constantly walk around going, ‘This guy bothers me.,’” he says. “Things you would probably just blow off, I get incensed by. But out of that kernel comes really great stuff. My wife never worked in a restaurant, but I worked in restaurants my whole life. So a lot of the show is just taking the audience through things like the entire experience of going to a sit-down dinner with my wife and her family and all the things that annoy me.”