MUSIC REVIEW : Weird Al’s Shtick Getting a Bit Tiresome

Truism No. 501 in the Book of Comedy: Anyone who oversells himself with a silly name--Crazy Chris or Wacky Wayne or Goofy George--is not advertising originality, subtlety, wit. More likely, he is covetous of a spot on “Hee Haw.”

But every level of humor must have its champion, and Weird Al Yankovic certainly is the king of the obvious, the inane, and the redundant when it comes to parodying popular music. Yankovic proved his mastery of the MTV-era equivalent of seltzer-bottle high jinks with a performance Thursday night at Sound FX.

In a gimmicky, prop-laden production that no doubt meets Yankovic’s definition of “theatrical,” the self-styled pop jester treated several hundred faithful to an overly generous survey of his now-familiar catalogue of shtick. Interspersing his live song parodies with film, commercial and cartoon clips projected onto a nearby screen (thus allowing him time for costume and set changes), Yankovic reeled off a seemingly interminable string of his greatest hit-jobs. Backed by a rock quartet, the accordion-wielding Yankovic opened with “Addicted to Spuds” (a send-up of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”) that featured two people in Mr. Potato Head outfits as counterparts to the lithe models in Palmer’s video. He followed with a “Polkas on 45”-style medley of polka-fied rock and hip-hop tunes, including Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love,” Digital Underground’s “Do the Humpty Hump,” and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.”

Such nonsense probably looks promising on paper, and that’s really where it belongs. Yankovic’s humor is an undergraduate at the wouldn’t-it-be-funny school, born of the kind of extemporaneous fun-making that can get a group of buddies guffawing into their beers, but which is much better imagined than executed.

From Day One in 1979, when student Yankovic scored on the campus radio station at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with his cheaply recorded “My Bologna” (the Knack’s “My Sharona”), his modus operandi has never varied. He finds a phonemic play on a song title, and then fleshes out the idea by writing nutty new lyrics. Given so simplistic a premise, there are three quick stages of response to a Yankovic gag. First comes recognition, as in, “I know that song.” Then comes comprehension, as in, “Oh, I get it.” Last, at least in theory, comes laughter.

That third stage definitely is optional, and, arguably, problematical. Yet, inexplicably, there remains a relatively large, eager audience for a routine that long ago was showing signs of age.

Before Yankovic took the stage, his fans chanted “We want Al!” At one point, they separated into two camps (a la the “Less filling”/”Tastes great” commercials) to parry with shouts of “Weird!” and “Al!” Later, they cheered lustily, laughed loudly, and even high-fived each other when Yankovic played a favorite, which was inevitable considering how much ground he covered.

He did “Lasagna” (a take-off on “La Bamba”) and “Living with a Hernia” (James Brown’s “Living in America”), and wore a loose-fitting, Hammer-ish outfit for “Can’t Watch This” (“Can’t Touch This”). He did a medley of his food-oriented japes (unwittingly evidencing his paucity of ideas) that included “Rye or the Kaiser” (“Eye of the Tiger”), “I Love Rocky Road” (Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”), “Chicken Pot Pie” (McCartney’s “Live and Let Die”), “Whole Lotta Lunch” (Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”), and two of his biggest hits, “Eat it” (Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”) and, of course, “My Bologna.”

Yankovic even donned operating-room greens and grabbed a hacksaw to reprise his spoof of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (“Like a Surgeon”), which, even at the time of its release in the early-’80s, seemed a clear indication of the strain Yankovic was under to find workable word plays.

Yankovic’s bludgeoning performance style, at least, is consistent with the subtlety and variety of his humor. Where talented song-parodists elicit deep, sustained laughter by tickling the funny bone and the cerebrum at the same time (see nationally known comedian Dennis Blair, or San Diego’s David Bradley or Jose Sinatra), Yankovic prefers the potted-plant-on-the-noggin approach.

Instead of singing the lyrics Thursday night, he shouted most of them in a monotonous yowl that wore on the ears faster than any injudiciously amplified instrument ever could. Rather than draw listeners into the gags by playing it at least half-serious, he delivered each lyric with vaudevillian facial expressions and exaggerated bobs of his Captain Hook-maned head, perhaps assuming that he must drive home the point that this is, after all, supposed to be a spoof .

Even the film clips were thematically repetitive, and--much worse--derivative. A mock-commercial about “Spatula City” must have seemed inspired to those who hadn’t seen David Letterman’s visits to such actual New York shops as “Only Lampshades,” or the “Saturday Night Live” sketch about a Scotch tape store. The mock-movie-trailer for “Gandhi II,” in which the legendary pacifist returns to kick some you-know-what, Rambo-style, was taken from Yankovic’s movie, “UHF.”

One hoped that Yankovic at least would have freshened his shtick since his 1985 show at Humphrey’s, which wasn’t exactly a high watermark in live music-comedy. Instead, Thursday night’s show demonstrated that he isd content to keep repackaging the same old corn, with little thought for renovation, let alone innovation. But then, why break new ground when you can make more money breaking wind? If his current show left any impression of genuine value, it was that what we really need in 1992 is someone to spoof Weird Al Yankovic.