CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio – If you ask the average music fan for the type of people who attend Weird Al Yankovic concerts, they would likely say 12-year-old boys and 30-year-old men. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
But after more than 40 years of smart and silly parodies and “in the style of” songs, Weird Al is a pop culture institution, and Saturday night at Blossom, the energetic 65-year-old singer-songwriter-accordionist gave his multigenerational audience two hours of comedy music hits, costume changes and constant reminders via quick-cut video montages that he has been embedded in pop culture for a long time.
There were still plenty of 12-year-old boys and 30-year-old men, (white and nerdy) but also multi-generational families in bright Hawaiian shirts and curly wigs, couples, friend groups in gangsta Amish getups and various other visual cues and references from Yankovic’s storied and unlikely career as the most successful comedy musical artist ever.
The “Bigger and Weirder” show mixed Yankovic parodic and “in the style of” hits interspersed with many video clips, covering the frequent costume changes, many of which included his entire eight-piece band costumed as Amish folk for “Amish Paradise,” or wearing yellow jumpsuits and energy domes and doing herky-jerky moves for the Devo-inspired “Dare To Be Stupid.”
The “Bigger and Weirder” intro film featured an oversized Weird Al digitally inserted into a ’50s-era giant monster horror movie. The music began with “Tacky” from Yankovic’s ostensibly final album “Mandatory Fun,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 2014.
The parody of Pharrell Williams’ global hit “Happy” found Yankovic singing the lyrics about a tacky person doing tacky things (“Wear my belt with suspenders and sandals with my socks”) while walking through the Blossom backstage area, before entering through the excited crowd to the stage.
In addition to the direct song parodies, among Yankovic’s talents are matching completely disparate music styles and genre pastiches with mundane or silly subject matter.
“Mission Statement,” musically modeled on Crosby, Stills & Nash’s classic “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” deftly turns a string of hollow corporate jargon (“In order to holistically administrate, Exceptional synergy, We’ll set a brand trajectory, Using management philosophy”) into a lovely three-part harmonized, hippie folk-rock jam performed well by his eight-piece band.
Fan favorite “Word Crimes” takes Robin Thicke’s lyrically lunkheaded “Blurred Lines” and turns it into a clever piece of grammar pedantry. The ’50s-style doo-wop ballad, “One More Minute,” had fans singing about how they would “rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue, than spend one more minute with you.” Hardcore fans even shouted the dialogue in the video intro of the Michael Jackson parody “Fat” (“Ding Dongs, man. Ding Dongs!”).
Yankovic also broke out the latest in his long line of polka medleys to fans’ delight, mixing in bouncy polka-ized snippets of chart-topping hits of the past decade, including “Uptown Funk,” Adele’s “Hello”, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” and Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion’s controversial “WAP.”
The interspersed video clips and montages not only served to cover costume changes but also were reminders that “Weird Al” has woven through American pop culture for four decades.
The clips included his brief but beloved MTV television show featuring funny and fake celebrity interviews, his impressive amount of cameos on TV shows and movies and cartoon themes songs, including “Captain Underpants Theme,” which had fans smiling and shouting “na-na-na, Captain Underpants, more powerful than boxer shorts!” alongside their spouses, kids and parents.
The parodies and pastiches are so well done that when he performed a pleasant and totally straight cover of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” half the audience seemed to be waiting for the punchline that never came.
Following a short film parody of the chair-throwing scene from “Whiplash,” the opening set ended with the heavy-duty rap twofer of “White & Nerdy with Yankovic rocking his “Straight Outta Linwood” shirt and a sing-along “Amish Paradise.”
The show wound down with a stage full of stormtroopers and a slightly too short Darth Vader for the “American Pie” parody “The Saga Begins” and the Kinks’ “Lola” parody “Yoda,” both of which became huge sing-alongs underneath the shed and out on the quite full lawn.
Yankovic may be done recording and releasing albums, but if he’s settled into legacy mode, he has a pop culture legacy like no other artist in the modern era, and he still puts on multimedia show that inspires two-plus hours of knowing smiles and chuckles.
For the clown averse, meeting show opener Puddles Pity Party would be a waking nightmare. Puddles, a bald, 6’ 8” clown in ghostly white greasepaint wearing a white clown jumpsuit, white fingerless gloves and black nail polish, is an objectively terrifying sight even for folks who are generally fine with clowns.
But his nine-song set mixing silent mime-style comedy, oddball short films, audience participation, and odd covers and comedy tunes was very entertaining, funny and certainly different.
Puddles pulled an elementary school-aged fan from the crowd (“Who wants to help the clown?” a jaunty 1930s tune asked as he picked his marks) to play a fake guitar for his dramatic cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and dug deep in his low tenor for a melodramatic piano-ballad reading of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind.”
Another clown helper, an eager, gray-headed man was roughly adorned in a cheap tequila bottle costume for a near operatic take on the Los Lobos song “Estoy Sentado Aqui.”
Puddles also broke out a very fake triple-neck “guitar” for the solo of his cover of Little Roger and the Goosebumps “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” parody, matching the music from “Stairway to Heaven” with the lyrics to the theme from “Gilligan’s Island,” as clips from show and the ’90s film “Waterworld” were shown on screen.
Puddles is also apparently obsessed with Kevin Costner, evidenced by the “Waterworld” clips and his torch ballad take on “My Heart Will Go On” sung to clips and photos of the Oscar-winning actor as fans waved their phone lights in solidarity.
While we still wouldn’t want to bump into Puddles in a dark alley on a dark night alone, from the stage, his act fits right in with Weird Al’s clever and chaotic charms.