“Weird Al” Yankovich clowns on San Diego with Puddles Pity Party

Some concerts you wait your whole life for. Hyperbole effing valid. The year was 1996. The cassette tape was Bad Hair Day. The artist, “Weird Al” Yankovich. The place — afterschool kiddie care in a little shed overflowing with spiders at the back of a rural elementary campus in Boise, Idaho while my mom took her sweet time picking me up from school every day.

And everything was jussssst PEACHY!!

Not only did I take a deep dive into the intricacies of the Amish at an impressive age, I learned that “driving on the freeway in the fast lane with a rabid wolverine in my underwear” was not the best idea. And I’ve never done since. Sure, I was in second grade and probably could’ve used a hug or a cookie or a dad, but I had Weird Al. And that was enough.

I became the wisecracking, loud-mouthing, quasi-adulting grown-ass woman I am today because of that cassette tape. And perhaps a handful of other elements, but I digress. By the age of 12, I either wanted to write for South Park when I grew up or write parody songs for a living. Because, evidently, success to me was piggybacking off someone else’s greatness.

So, there I was…

The year was 2026 when I finally got to achieve my lifelong dream of seeing the man, the myth, the accordion on his Bigger and Weirder Tour smack-dab in my own tiny little neck of the woods I like to call San Diego. Things were really happening for me, people.

Opening for Al at the Rady Shell was Puddle Pity Party, a 7-foot-something white-faced sad clown talking in third-person with a whole slew of covers. Because nothing sets the mood like a giant lamenting clown belting out Ozzy’s “Crazy Train”. Puddles worked the crowd with a handheld camera, inviting people throughout the set to join him onstage. In all, it was actually quite an entertaining time, even for the anti-vax, er, I mean, anti-clowners in the place.

When it was time for Weird Al, the whacky guy chose to come in “Tacky” as all hell, a more recent parody set to Pharrell’s “Happy”. Matching blazer and shirt with clashing pants, Al managed to smash Puddles with a cream pie on the way in. What a legend. Infused with many video breaks, the show went on to include a PowerPoint presentation, many polka medleys, and costume changes for days. Al jumped from “Eat It” to “Like a Surgeon” with the kind of precision only a newly graduated med school student could wield.

No malpractice suits on this stage, no siree doodle.

By the time Al retired, even feigning retirement age with shoulders hunched over needing help walking offstage, we had laughed, we had cried, we had bought it on Ebay. But we hadn’t wound up on Tatooine. We knew something was sus.

That’s when Al and crew returned in full Star Wars regalia. There were jedis and stormtroopers and Chewie. There was the Emperor holding down the keys. And there was Al, ready to tell us how “The Saga Begins”…

The only appropriate way to revisit the monstrosity that is Episode One.

That encore naturally led into “Yoda”… “Y-O-DA, Yoda!”, before Al and team broke everyone’s minds with a 10-minute nonstop slew of interpretative gibberish. Lights faded in and out; players vanished behind Al before reappearing; was this real life or all in our mind??! The reverberating audible gibberish gelled into slimy little ear-worms gnawing away at our souls like crazed hamsters never given a hamster wheel in their short, fuzzy, little lives. And, right at the moment I was about to breakdown into an existential crisis, Weird Al slammed back into “Yoda” without missing a beat. And that’s when I exasperatingly laugh-cried for close to five minutes, out of breath and braincells. I then promptly beelined over to the merch table for them to take all my money. Because Weird Al had broken me and he must be compensated.

Photography by Johnnie Crow; recap article by Kristy Rose

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