"CHOP IT! CHOP IT!" -- the saga and legend of Towbin Dodge in Vegas

The best experiences in Vegas this weekend had more to do with the city than the Strip (keep in mind that the city is 2.5 million in size and growing, the place is just one massive sprawl now). More on the food at Lotus of Siam elsewhere, but the mental mind-blower of the weekend had to come from the ad that Donut D., a friend of his and myself stumbled across while waiting for others to join us last night.

It has to do with Towbin Dodge in Henderson. If that was all it was, then there would be little more to say -- but in terms of advertising and salesmanship, these guys are gold. They've apparently been featured on Fakin' It on TLC and It's a Living on A&E, so the word is getting around. They are PERFECT for Vegas -- and not in a finger-snapping or family-fun way, this is more an eruption of beautiful trash, gaudy and sleazy and macho and nuts.

The key to it is the son of the dealer -- real name Joshua Towbin but he goes by 'the Chopper' on what appear to be regular weekly half-hour local informercials on some local station -- the time we caught this one was something like 10 pm so it wasn't night owls being targeted here per se. Donut and I concluded that he was a bit like Sinbad (especially in looks) meets Wolfman Jack, raspy voiced, has this rapid fire patter down, seems not to stop for breath -- the guy is a pro and works it hard. The core of his schtick is to stand in the parking lot in front of the main dealership -- just a one-camera set-up, nothing too fancy -- and have one truck or car roll up one after another, allowing him to talk about the latest deals, run down what the vehicle's got and pitch some prices. He always starts high so some off-camera group of characters -- you can hear them and given their reactions elsewhere it doesn't appear to be an endless loop -- can shout back in disapproval "CHOP IT!" He immediately ratchets down, they go "CHOP IT!" and so forth until he smoothly busts out the actual selling price, there's cheering and the truck drives away so the next one can roll up. He could be an auctioneer, he could be Pigmeat Markham's bastard kid, he's got *that* vibe -- and unsurprisingly he loves collecting the celebrity appearances for all to see (Don King, the UNLV Cheerleaders, Tony Curtis, Master P, and that's just the video clips!).

Now if this was all he did, it would just be the equivalent of Cal Worthington's glory days out here in the seventies, a rapidly digested schtick that's amusing but doesn't need to be repeated much, and you'd think a half-hour of just that would be insane. Clearly THEY know this too, and so to keep things interesting they've evolved this bizarre freak show that...man, I don't know WHAT to call it. It's definitely one of the funniest things I've seen in a long while and if I had to pin it down, imagine Pimp My Ride as conceived by John Waters with creative consultancy from Dave Chappelle.

So besides the Chopper there's a running group of extra characters -- in the background, for instance, there's always some dude mock-playing electric guitar bopping around like he's Sly Stone playing Hendrix or something (and seriously, that's ALL he does), while there's also the Blue Genie, some short dude slathered in full blue makeup obviously inspired by Vegas standbys the Blue Man Group, except dressed in a gold mock-Arabian Nights outfit and usually doing everything from humping the rims to emerging from the back seats talking about how he's just blown the driver.

Then there are the drivers of the cars themselves, some of whom are just (apparently) regular folks driving up so the Chopper's schtick can be made and then driving off. But sometimes they're these bizarro caricatures who at their best are delivering trash talk and humor as quickly as the Chopper and his buds -- we saw everything from some shrimp in a Darth Vader mask to some big-ass dude with a Jheri Curl wig halfway down his back. It was all filmed as one take mania, there's nothing tying it all together besides the relentlessness of the patter and the simplicity of the concept. Stereotypes all across the board were gleefully embraced. It's an explosion of bad taste in excelsis, and I'd say it was less that they all were undiscovered comic geniuses than it is just a perfection of a certain form of attention-grabbing hucksterism that is just plain surreal.

The best place to see for yourself is here, where they've got the TV show bits I mentioned above plus other things, including the Chopper Show, which is the informercial in question, presumably updated weekly. The regular show introduction is mindboggling enough.

I'm trying to find out what more I can about all this -- it should be said that they definitely have some enemies. There's a whole Chopper Cars fraud site here (it appears to be a one-man effort that verges on crankdom), while there was an exchange of lawsuits and charges last year with a former customer that might still be going on. Other negative discussions can be found here and here.

But basically -- here it is, go for it. Donut D to thread!