"Weird Al" Yankovic played The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor on Jul. 4 to a sold-out crowd, and Windsor got itself an American comedic hero for the night. The city ate it up. Forty-plus years into this career, the guy still delivers, and if you didn't have a good time at this show you might just be a Canadian Idiot.
The show opened with "Tacky," and Yankovic wasn't on stage for it. He was on the video wall, walking from backstage through the venue's corridors while the band played live in front of the crowd, the camera catching him pass Puddles Pity Party along the way for two pies to the face. He worked his way toward the stage over the course of the song and finally arrived in person right as it ended. Cheap gag, works every time.
That's where things went sideways. The PA cut out and stayed dead for 10 minutes. Yankovic didn't wait it out backstage. He picked up the accordion and played "Beer Barrel Polka" acoustically while the crew worked the board, and drummer Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz filled part of the gap telling the crowd the story of Heinrich Hoffmann's "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb." Most acts lose a room over a 10-minute dead mic. Yankovic turned it into a highlight. When the sound came back, the band moved straight into "Mission Statement" like nothing had happened, because for him, apparently, nothing had.
"Mission Statement," the Crosby, Stills & Nash pastiche built entirely from corporate jargon, depends on the band's vocal harmonies to sell the joke, and they sold it. "Polkamania!" ran the tour's polka medley at a tempo that leaves no margin for the accordion. "Everything You Know Is Wrong" and "One More Minute" kept the middle of the set moving, the latter still the meanest song in the show under its doo-wop candy shell.
Most acts lose a room over a 10-minute dead mic. Yankovic turned it into a highlight.
The 11-song medley carried the back half of the main set: Party in the CIA, It's All About the Pentiums, Bedrock Anthem, My Bologna, Ricky, Ode to a Superhero, I Love Rocky Road, Eat It, Like a Surgeon, Word Crimes and Canadian Idiot, run together with no gaps. It's built for maximum nostalgia per minute, and nothing in it gets more than a minute before the next parody replaces it. The crowd sang along to every single one, which is the whole point.
"Fat" brought the suit out. "It's My World (and We're All Living in It)" and "Captain Underpants Theme Song" pulled the younger half of the crowd toward the stage. "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" was played completely straight, no joke attached, and the crowd gave it back a real reaction instead of a laugh. "Skipper Dan" closed out the deep cuts before "eBay," "Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me," "White & Nerdy" and "Amish Paradise" ran the set home. The encore, "The Saga Begins" into "Yoda," closed the night.
Puddles Pity Party opened the show and then spent the rest of the night as Yankovic's on-stage foil, pies included, doing the kind of physical comedy that requires real commitment and zero dialogue. Windsor loved him. He got some of the loudest reactions of the night for doing almost nothing but standing there in full Pagliacci sorrow, and that's a hard trick to pull off for two hours straight. He pulled it off.
There's no version of this show that doesn't work. Yankovic is 66 and running an eight-piece band through a two-hour, costume-heavy production with the stamina of someone half his age, and when the equipment failed him, he outworked it. That's not luck. That's four decades of knowing exactly how to hold a crowd. Windsor got the full legend, PA outage included, and walked out happier for it.
Weird Al Yankovic
Puddles Pity Party
