Like music you can laugh to? Here’s when you can catch ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in Augusta

Accordion virtuoso and master of the musical parody “Weird Al” Yankovic announced the dates for his new tour on Friday, and he will be making a stop only a few short hours from Beaufort County.

This tour will be a drastic departure for the comedy musician, whose shows normally involve elaborate staging, costumes and video elements as he switches from spoof to spoof.

If you are pining for his classic parodies of songs from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” to “American Pie,” to “Achy Breaky Heart,” to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and too many more to name, this might not be the show for you.

This tour, billed as “The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill Advised Vanity Tour,” will mostly eschew his hits.

Instead, Yankovic and his band are “just going to walk out on stage, sit down on stools, and play a bunch of old songs. Oh, and we’re going to be performing almost exclusively originals (i.e. not parodies). The deep cuts and obscure tracks. The songs that were never hits. The ones you barely remember,” according to the tour announcement on Yankovic’s Facebook page.

Yankovic said in his announcement that he knows this type of show isn’t for everyone, but that a very vocal subset of his fans have been asking for it for years.

One advantage of doing a low tech show, according to Yankovic, is that it will allow him to do things differently each night.

“Because all my concerts in the past were so highly produced, they needed to be rigidly planned down to the SECOND, and therefore the shows were virtually identical from one city to the next,” said Yankovic on Facebook. “But since this tour is unencumbered by theatrics, we have a lot more flexibility.”

Idiosyncratic stand-up comic Emo Philips will be touring with Yankovic as a special guest.

Yankovic will be performing at Augusta’s Miller Theater on Saturday, April 14.

Ticket prices have not been announced, but a check of venues where prices have been posted indicate a likely cost of between $40 and $70.

Tickets will be on sale at noon on Friday, Oct. 20, and Yankovic stressed in his Facebook announcement that the venues for these shows would be smaller, so tickets might go quickly.

This story was originally published October 14, 2017 at 6:32 PM with the headline "Like music you can laugh to? Here’s when you can catch ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in Augusta."