Funny / Casino

• Nicky explaining how pragmatic you have to be when burying people in the desert:
  Got a lot of holes in the desert... and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. Except you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half hour or 45 minutes of diggin'. And who knows who's gonna be comin' along in that time? Before you know it, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night!
• Nicky at his finest when he first arrives in Vegas and roams in the casinos. With a subtle walk he approaches two wiseguys from another crime family based in Chicago looking to case the Tangiers, taps one in the shoulder and not-so-subtly lets them know the casino is under his protection. The two guys then make up an obviously bullshit story about why they’re there and then awkwardly make themselves scarce.
• Nicky’s reaction to Ginger’s beauty when he first meets her:
  Nicky: Holy shit, Sam what have you been doing out here.
  Nicky: Okay Sammy.
  • Sam responds with an ‘I know right’ facial expression.
• Ace putting his pants on in his office before a meeting with the County Commissioner. He just still has his shoes on, too.
• Nicky escorting a gorgeous showgirl out to his car to get a blowjob from her while, all the time, droning on about the veal he stocks in the kitchens of the restaurant he owns.
• Nicky's constant swearing (most of the 422 f-words used in this film come out of his mouth) and insults, combined with Joe Pesci's high-pitched voice, often crosses the line into hilarious. The funniest one is his berating of one of his henchmen who took his shoes off and put his feet on the table at Ace's casino:
  "You shit-kickin', stinky horse-manure-smellin' muddafucker, you!"
  • Also, when he badgers a gambling-addicted informant over blowing all his utility money.
    "Don't fuck with me, Al! Don't you make a fuck outta me!"
  • When he looks through binoculars at the cops spying on him:
    "Peek-a-boo, you fucks you!"
  • When Tony Dogs, even with his head squeezed in a vise, tells Nicky "fuck you" instead of giving up the name of who helped with shooting up Remo's bar, which pisses off an exasperated Nicky:
    "Two fucking days and nights! Fuck me?! Fuck me?! You motherfucker, fuck my mother?! That's what you're telling me, you motherfucker!"
  • And he pleads with Dogs to "not make him be a bad guy". Fairly certain that ship has sailed.
• Piscano's mother's face when he says, "They could all be in on it together, those miserable fucks!"
  • "I'm sorry, Ma, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm upset!"
• After threatening Ace’s banker, Nicky asks Ace: “Do you think he got the point?”.
• Ace's daughter endlessly antagonizing Lester and driving him nuts.
  "She started it. She started the whole thing. I'm just standing here."
  • At one point, they get into a childish "Shut up!" "No, you shut up!" argument.
  Lester: You want me to come over there? I'll smack your face. (as Amy sticks her tongue out at him) Don't give me your shit!
  • It's even better in the scene where Ginger is talking with Ace on the telephone and he's trying to convince her and Amy to fly back to Vegas. While Ginger is tearfully sobbing, Lester and Amy are childishly arguing with each other in the background.
  • Not to mention Amy relentlessly flicking Lester in the back of the head.
• At the end, following a confrontation between Ginger, Ace and Nicky, Ace ends up paranoid that he's going to be receiving a visit from Nicky and his friends that he won't survive. The next morning, having stayed awake all night with Billy and a shotgun, he hears a noise on the lawn. It's Ginger, drunk and high, repeatedly driving her car right into the back of his and screaming at him. The look on Ace's face is part relief, part "... Really? I stayed up all night for this?"
  • Then in the midst of Ginger's breakdown, one of the cops called the scene by the neighbors makes a painful attempt at small talk with Ace:
  "How's everything else besides this?"
• Remo questions Frankie about Nicky's behavior and the general unrest in Vegas. He starts off by saying that a person's head was found in the desert, and asks if Frankie knows anything about it, to which he says "no". But the way Remo mentions it, so off-handed and matter-of-factly, like this kind of thing happens all the time, and he's generally shocked that people are making a big deal out of it, you'd think they were discussing someone finding a hair in their soup.
  Remo: They found a guy's head in the desert... Everybody is talking about it and making a big deal about it, it's in all the papers! [...] That's no good, you have to tell him to take care of things a little better.
• The scene where a plane being used by The Feds is forced to make an emergency landing on a golf fairway, because it had been circling Nicky's golf game for so long that it ran out of gas. This results in the two agents inside quickly trying to run off of the greens, holding fairly obvious cameras... all while Ace is trying to get through his casino license hearing by The Control Board. Nicky's response?
  "A hundred dollars, whoever hits the plane." (Cut to Nicky and his gang whacking golf balls at the airplane)
  • And it's funny because this really did happen. Albeit due to mechanical issues, and not fuel.
• Ace's Control Freak nature hits overdrive when in the middle of his tense life, he notices that his blueberry muffin has fewer blueberries than that on Green's plate. Quick cut—he's down in the kitchen telling the kitchen staff to ensure that there are an equal number of blueberries in each muffin. When the chef tells him that this will delay cooking, his reply is one for the ages.
  "I don't care how long it takes. Put an equal—amount—in each—muffin."
  • Bonus points for the camera panning back and forth between the two muffins, as if being comically sympathetic.
  • The look on the poor baker's face is pure gold. You just know he's thinking "I'm working for a madman".
  • If you listen closely to the music as he walks off to the kitchen, the singer asks "How long can this go on?" Even the background music thinks it's outrageous!
  • Fridge Brilliance when you consider not just that the real-life counterpart Lefty Rosenthal was eccentric like this, but this is also his lesson to Green about what it means to very carefully scrutinize the floor.
• Ace's ending speech, which is essentially him telling the tale of how Las Vegas' Audience-Alienating Era began. Specifically the part where he laments that "today it looks like Disneyland" while we get a dramatic shot of a gang of old people entering the casino with the operatic music from the opening playing in the background.
• Nicky dislikes being "watched" by the people he robs so he turns their pictures around, as if he were the offended party there.
• The infamous scene with Nicky overspending in the casino.
  • "How the fuck can you grin? How the fuck can you grin? You know how much I'm stuck? Do you give a fuck? Do ya?"
  • "Take this stiff and pound it up your fucking ass!"
    • "Take this stiff and pound it up your sister's ass!"
  • "Why the fuck do you keep lookin' at him?"
  • And, of course, to Sherbert: "What are you staring at, you bald-headed Jew prick?" He proceeds to beat him up with a telephone, even ripping it off the wall and slamming it on his back as he's on the ground.
  • All of this is wonderfully set to "Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence "Frogman" Henry. As such, uploads of the song on YouTube are filled with comments from the film.
• The scene where Nicky and Frankie have a business conversation out on the street (because the FBI had already placed a wire in their joint), but have to keep covering their mouths because of the lip readers. Better, at one point a man walks past the two of them as a paranoid Nicky asks "Who's this guy? Who's this guy?" Turns out, that moment wasn't scripted: he was just a random man walking in the middle of the scene and Pesci's reaction to it was real.
• When Ace learns that Ginger is having an affair with Nicky, he is less angry than terrified, since such a thing could get them all killed. Ginger tries to reassure him that she can "back him off".
  Ace: (narrating) And this, this is how she backed him off.
  [cut to Nicky having sex with Ginger from behind.]
• Lester, after taking a beating from Ace's goons, shouts, in a way that only James Woods could:
  "Why didn't you do it yourself, ya chickenshit cocksucker?!"
• Ace sarcastically describing Nicky's "infallible" betting system: if he didn't win, he told the bookies to go fuck themselves.
• At one point, Philip Green has a business partner of his own decide to sue him for her share of money. Green is going to be forced to open up his books, so this is what the Chicago mobsters decide to do, according to Nicky:
  Nicky: The boys back home wanted to settle the case out of court, so they sent me!
  • And by "settle the case out of court", we mean Nicky walks up on her in her house and nonchalantly shoots her point-blank three times in the head. Then pats her head.
  • This action leads to more scrutiny on Green, the squeaky clean front man, forcing Ace to do press interviews clarifying Green's position. Which he inevitably slips up in, causing his status as the actual man in charge to become public record.
    Billy: Green's here about two or three times a month and he's busy with other real estate deals, and things, y'know.
    Reporter: So in Green's absence then, you're the boss?
    Ace: I serve at the pleasure of the chairman of the board and my, uh, responsibilities are to run the day to day operations.
    Reporter: So day-to-day. Then you're the boss.
    Ace: Well in a sense, you could say that I am the boss when Mr. Green is away. You could say that.
    [Cut to newspaper headline: Sam Rothstein: "I'm the Boss!"]
• Remo tells Andy to make sure Ace gets a job that won’t draw attention. The scene immediately cuts to his brand new TV show, “Ace’s High”.
  Green: Oh Jesus. He's juggling.
  • This is the one scene the real Lefty Rosenthal took offense to... because he never juggled on his show.
• After Nicky violently forces Ginger out of his restaurant, she threatens to go to the FBI. His response: “Alright. Ok be careful.”
• The gangster who murders John Nance, casually deadpanning "Where you going, jagoff?" as a mortally wounded Nance tries to flee. On a metatextual level, the gangster was played by Frank Cullotta (who is portrayed as "Frankie Marino" by Frank Vincent in the movie...a lot of Franks!), who really did assassinate John Nance's real-life equivalent, Jay Vandermark.
• Don Ward's complete cluelessness about the basic parameters of his job are pretty humorous. After his slots get hit for three jackpots in a twenty minute span, an incredulous Sam asks him what the odds are of that happening. Don shrugs and says that it's "gotta be in the millions, maybe more", giving away that he doesn't even know the odds of a jackpot on the slot machines when he's supposed to be the slots manager. A minute later, Sam says the odds of a single jackpot on those slots is a million and a half to one, and billions for multiple, meaning that Don's estimate was several orders of magnitude off, so he doesn't even have a general idea. Beyond all that, Sam's question was rhetorical, meant to highlight how obvious it is that the machines were rigged to produce jackpot spins.
  Ward: Well, it's a casino! People gotta win sometimes.
  Ace: (in disbelief) Ward, you're pissing me off. Now you're insulting my intelligence...
  • Fans of B-grade movies enjoy this even more with the knowledge that Don Ward is played by John Bloom, a.k.a. drive-in exploitation movie host Joe Bob Briggs.
• The bosses getting angsty because somedy is skimming from the skimmers
  Borelli: Aspetta, Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that the money we're robbing is being robbed? That somebody's robbing from us? We go through all this fuckin' trouble, and somebody's robbin' us?
  Nance: Like I said, you know, i-it's part of the business. I-it's considered leakage.
  other boss: Leakage, my balls. I want the guy who's robbin' us.

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