Apr 28, 2016 By Scott Tady for The 5 min read

If you’ve only become a fan of Sebastian Maniscalco in the past few months, don’t worry that you’ve arrived late to the party.

“You’re not late to the party, the party just didn’t get to you until now,” Maniscalco said.

Though it’s been more than 15 years since he left blue-collar Chicago for the glitz of Los Angeles, Maniscalco’s momentum as a standup comic has only recently begun to snowball to the point he’s been hailed as the “next big comedy star” by Newsweek.

This past January, Maniscalco guest starred in an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s popular web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

Seinfeld, as famous a comic as there is, hailed Maniscalco as “incredibly funny” and said, “This guy just makes me laugh in so many different ways. He looks funny, he moves funny, he talks funny.”

Local fans can marvel at Maniscalco’s comedy when he does a double-dip of performances, at 7 and 10 p.m. April 30, at the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall.

“Thank God it’s not football season on a Sunday,” Maniscalco said.

The 42-year-old Italian-American comic has done enough Sunday shows at The Improv in West Homestead to know that on a Steelers’ game day, “That place looks like a ghost town.”

Saturday’s two Munhall shows will be what Maniscalco describes as a “final tune-up” before starting a seven-night run Sunday at the Beacon Theatre in New York during which he will tape his next Showtime comedy special, titled “Why Would You Do That?”

That will be the followup to his likewise question-asking TV standup specials “What’s Wrong With People?” (2012) and “Aren’t You Embarrassed?” (2014).

Maniscalco’s stand-up offers social commentary on marriage, family and his Italian upbringing, though his specialty might be pointing out the annoying rudeness of people.

He’s the guy who can’t grasp the significance of selfies, which he refers to as “lonelys,” rationalizing you must lack real friends if you feel compelled to store 83 photos of yourself in your smartphone.

“Do you know how lonely you have to be to take a photo of yourself?” he asks on stage, in a voice that’s no so much Lewis Black outrage, but more of a combination of bewilderment and sarcastic eye roll.

The slow service at Chipotle and the swarm of discourteous people who flock to yard sales have been other targets of his sharp and incisive humor. More recently, he’s been sinking his comic fangs into Whole Foods, the organic grocery store chain.

As Seinfeld pointed out, it’s not just what Maniscalco says, but how he says it, with lively facial expressions such as bulging-eye disbelief and the physicality of his stage routine, in which he hops, slides, stretches and strides, often imitating exaggeratedly the people and situations he mocks.

You might be surprised by one of Maniscalco’s biggest inspirations.

“Michael Jackson definitely influenced me in the way he moved on stage,” Maniscalco said. “His style was very physical and I sort of adopted that. I mean, I’m not dancing, but I want to convey a message with my body as well as my voice.”

That voice, full of masculine, Midwest Italian-American attitude, earned him a role in the animated movie “Nut Job 2,” fourth-billed behind Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl and Maya Rudolph for a film coming out in 2017, according to Internet Movie Data Base.

“I play a groundhog named Johnny,” he said.

He will appear in another 2017 comedy, “The House,”  starring Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler in the tale of a dad who convinces his friends to open an illegal casino in his basement to pay for his daughter’s college tuition. It was a thrill working with Ferrell, said Maniscalco, who plays a comedian hired to perform at the illicit casino.

Maniscalco hopes to find out in the next few weeks if NBC decided to develop the pilot episode of a family sitcom, “Sebastian,” he produced and co-starred in with Tony Danza who plays his father, and Vanessa Lachey, portraying his wife.

Envisioned as a largely autobiographical comedy, Maniscalco would play the son of an old school Italian-American, who like his dad, has been instilled with blue collar values and skepticism.

“My wife is the complete opposite — she’s sweet and trusting of everyone; I’m a little more defensive,” he said about his TV wife, though the same could be said of his real wife, L.A. painter Lana Gomez, according to what Maniscalco told Seinfeld in their drive-around-town interview.

It’s been quite a journey for someone who started out as a waiter at an Olive Garden in suburban Chicago, and whose earliest standup shows in L.A. were at bars and bowling alleys while he still waited tables at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Those waiter jobs, by the way, “definitely gave me a lot of material as far as how people behave,” Maniscalco said. “It was a case study.”

He’s outgrown comedy clubs where the waiters he feels empathy for keep hustling for tips.

For Maniscalco, the sky is the limit.

“Have I made it? I don’t know what that is. But I feel pretty good,” he said.

He soon could become a household name, even if — in the words of Seinfeld — he’s got the most syllables of any comic’s name.

Maniscalco knew he never could pick a shorter stage name.

“My father said, ‘Whatever you do, you’re not changing your name.'”