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There is a line in the movie Casino:

No matter what the Feds or the papers might have said about my car bombing, it was amateur night, you could tell. Whoever it was, they put the dynamite under the passenger side. But what they didn't know, what nobody outside the factory knew was that that model car was made with a metal plate under the driver's seat. It's the only thing that saved my life.

I understand the phrase to mean amateurish here. But is this phrase amateur night idiomatic? Is this usage common? With few sources having pithy words about this term, it seems a very uncommon term.

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    You may also hear the term "amateur hour" rather than "amateur night" but they convey the same concept.
    – barbecue
    Aug 30, 2018 at 19:42

2 Answers 2

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"Amateur night" has two meanings:

  1. an entertainment featuring amateur performers, often in competition for prizes.
  2. Informal. an example of or situation marked by flagrant ineptitude:
    Critics say it's been amateur night at the embassy since the new ambassador took over.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary via Dictionary.com

The latter is the one being used in your quote and it is a noun here, much like Tuesday in "it was Tuesday".

See also: Oxford Dictionaries Online's definition.

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    In case it's not obvious, the latter is derived from the former. If a music venue (or a stand-up comedy club, or even a strip club) normally has professional performers, but one night a week has an "amateur night" that allows anyone to sign up to perform, you'd expect the quality of entertainment that night to be much lower than normal. That's what "amateur night" means; that things are going especially poorly due to inexperience and/or ineptitude.
    – BradC
    Aug 30, 2018 at 20:07
  • Could you remind me again why these old questions come up at the top of the list? Is it just because someone opens them?[Such a pain for done and dusted questions, don't you think?] I can delete this later. Thanks.
    – Lambie
    Jan 4 at 17:25
  • @Lambie In this case I got an upvote randomly which drew my attention here and then I decided to make an edit, which is what bumped the post. (I try not to bump too many inactive posts at once, but I think this is the first I edited on ELL today.)
    – Laurel
    Jan 4 at 17:37
  • @Laurel So random upvotes cause the questions to re-open?? Or is it editing that does? It's so confusing and some questions one never wants to see again. :)
    – Lambie
    Jan 4 at 17:39
  • @Lambie The edit alone bumped it; see faq. The upvote is why I decided to take a look and edit in this case. Also, you may want to look at the list of new questions instead of staying on the active page. If you want to ask more about the different views and searching, you could ask on meta (it's complicated).
    – Laurel
    Jan 4 at 18:18
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amateur night

noun

an entertainment featuring amateur performers, often in competition for prizes.

Informal. an example of or situation marked by flagrant ineptitude:

Critics say it's been amateur night at the embassy since the new ambassador took over.

Amateur night

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