“Weird Al” Yankovic · Puddles Pity Party

Some shows you go to for the music. Some you go to because you've been quoting the guy's lyrics since grade school and it's finally time to pay your respects. This was the second kind. After more than forty years of "Weird Al" Yankovic living rent-free in a corner of my brain, I finally got to see him live — and I got to do it surrounded by a big crew of family and friends.

Dinner in Weirton, then out to Star Lake

We made a proper night of it. Before the show a whole group of us met up for dinner here in Weirton: me, Catrina, and Preston, plus my cousins Julie and Johnny — and their spouses Brian and Holly, our friends Mandy and Larry, and Jeremy and Melissa. Jeremy and Melissa came out for the food but weren't headed to the show, which is a perfectly respectable way to participate. It was one of those loud, happy, long-table dinners where the meal runs longer than you planned and nobody minds.

From there we made the drive out to The Pavilion at Star Lake and tailgated for a little while in the lot before heading in — beautiful summer night for it (minus the rare drops of water that made an appearance). Our tickets had landed in a different spot from the rest of the group, so the three of us peeled off and went to find our seats, down at the front of Section 2. Great view, close enough to see everything, and no complaints from me.

Puddles Pity Party

We got in just in time to catch the last few notes of Puddles Pity Party, the opening act, which I wish we'd seen more of. If you've never encountered him, Puddles is a nearly seven-foot-tall sad clown with a shockingly beautiful, powerful singing voice — a deadpan, melancholy stage presence attached to a genuinely great set of pipes. It's a wonderfully strange pairing with Al, and exactly the right kind of strange.

"Weird Al" Yankovic

After a short changeover, the screens lit up and there was Al — making his way through the building on a live camera feed while "Tacky" played, his parody of Pharrell's "Happy," strutting through the concourse in appalling clothing until he finally emerged onto the stage. It's a perfect opener, and it sets the tone: this is the Bigger & Weirder 2026 Tour, the return to the full-production Weird Al show after years of stripped-down "vanity" tours, and it is a genuine spectacle — costume changes, a video wall, the full band, the whole machine.

For the uninitiated: Al Yankovic has been the undisputed king of musical comedy since 1979, when a homemade parody called "My Bologna" launched a career that's now spanned five decades, won him five Grammys, and made him the best-selling comedy recording artist in history. The man is an institution, accordion and all.

He tore right into the older material early, and that's when the childhood section of my brain switched on and I found I still knew every single word, note for note, without even trying. That stuff gets welded in when you're a kid and it never leaves. He ran through the hits and the deep cuts alike — "Smells Like Nirvana," "Dare to Be Stupid," a huge career-spanning parody medley that crammed a dozen songs ("Eat It," "Like a Surgeon," "White & Nerdy," "Word Crimes" and on and on) into one stretch, "Fat," "Amish Paradise," and a big Star Wars finale of "The Saga Begins" and "Yoda" to close it out. He even worked in a nod to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, his gleefully fictional 2022 biopic.

My favorite of the whole night, though, was "Everything You Know Is Wrong." It's not a parody at all — it's one of Al's original "style parodies," a song written from scratch in the unmistakable style of They Might Be Giants, all quirky non-sequiturs and lurching melody, and it's a loving homage to that band's whole sensibility. Hearing it live, done full-tilt, was the highlight. Sometimes the originals hit even harder than the parodies.

The other thing that made the night was watching Preston. He knew a surprising number of the songs and had an absolute blast, which is the best possible outcome when you drag your teenager to see a guy who was making hit records decades before he was born. And here's the kicker: this was the first time any of us — me, Catrina, or Preston — had ever seen Weird Al in person. I'd been a fan literally since childhood and somehow never caught him until now. Long overdue, and worth the wait.

The great escape

One last bit of hard-won local wisdom. We ducked out right as the final notes were hitting, speed-walked to the car, and got out of the lot in a matter of minutes — beating the rush entirely. Anyone who's been to a show at Star Lake knows the traffic getting out of that place can be an absolute nightmare, so sacrificing the last thirty seconds of the encore to save forty-five minutes in a parking lot is a trade I will make every single time. We were on the road home to Weirton before most of the crowd had even reached their cars.

A great night, a great group, and a bucket-list act finally checked off. Everything you know is wrong — except that Weird Al still puts on one of the best shows going.