Rapid City, SD – The world’s weird right now. Weird in the bad way, where everybody’s stressed and angry and short on patience, the kind nobody asked for. Thank goodness for a man like “Weird Al” Yankovic, still out there handing the good kind of weird back to people who need it. A few thousand of us got a dose of it at Summit Arena on Wednesday, June 24th.

I should know by now that whenever you go to an event like this, bags aren’t going to be allowed. But my wife has one that’s really nice and she likes to show it off. Still can’t take it into the venue. So I hiked it back to the car and missed the opening of a guy I’ve wanted to see for a number of years, Puddles Pity Party.

So I can’t tell you how he opens. What I can tell you is you hear that voice before you’ve even found your row. It’s a big, full baritone, and it’s not what you expect coming out of a guy in a clown suit. He’s a sad clown, six foot eight in full whiteface, and he never says a word between songs. One number started as Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” slow and reverent, and somewhere in the first verse the words turned into the theme from Gilligan’s Island. Footage from Kevin Costner’s Waterworld played on the screen behind him the whole time. He’s known for taking Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” and singing it as a slow, sad ballad, though that one came before I got to my seat.

The man under the makeup is Mike Geier, a singer out of Atlanta. He moved there in the mid-’90s and fronted a swing-and-soul cover band called Kingsized for years before any of this started. The clown came together in 1998 as part of a group act, and when that band broke up, Puddles stuck around as a solo thing. Geier has kept it going ever since, and he stays in it completely. He talks about Puddles in the third person, like the clown is a separate person he travels with, and he doesn’t break character to talk to the crowd or the press. Most of the country met him in 2017, when he made the quarterfinals on America’s Got Talent. When his set ended that night at Summit Arena, the whole place stood up for him.

Then the lights went down, and the video wall lit up.

“Weird Al” Yankovic starts his show in his dressing room. A camera follows him live on the big screen as he walks down a backstage hallway singing “Tacky,” his version of Pharrell’s “Happy.” He came through the hallway, through the building, and onto the stage in one continuous shot.

His second song was “Mission Statement,” which he performs against a deadpan corporate PowerPoint, mergers and synergy and buzzwords scrolling on the wall. You could feel the confusion in the room for a minute. Then “Polkamania!” hit third, his accordion medley, and he packed Billie Eilish and Adele and Lil Nas X and a dozen more songs into one breakneck run.

The show really takes off once Al gets into the character songs. He came out in the wig and flannel for his Nirvana number, then then pivots into the Devo costume. The costume changes take time, so he fills the gaps with video montages, reels of all the places Al has turned up over the years, the movie references, the TV shows, the cartoons. The screen never stopped moving. The “Bigger & Weirder” name on the tour poster started to make sense around here.

Here’s what I don’t think people give Al enough credit for. A song like “Word Crimes,” his version of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” is packed wall to wall with words, and he has to learn every one of them and land them in time over a track built to match the original note for note. His own songs are the same way, dense with lyrics, and he keeps it all straight at full speed for two hours. Forty years in, and he works that stage like a guy who still cares that his style of weird is what you’ll always remember.

The encore is just the best. The band grew to extra players and the whole group walked out in full Star Wars garb, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, a Jawa, for “The Saga Begins,” Al’s retelling of the prequels set to “American Pie.” The entire arena was singing the chorus back to him. It was magic. They rolled straight into “Yoda” after it. A full arena totally swept up in a song about a little green Muppet.

People filed out of Summit Arena still singing the Yoda lines, and I heard more than one person near me call Puddles the surprise of the night. What you talk about after a show like this is how hard it is to make parody music work at this level. Al makes two hours of it look easy, and watching it live is the only way to understand that it isn’t.