The Tragicomic Glory of Pauly Shore in 2023

Sometimes when you weez the juice, the juice weezes back

When I sold Scribner the book that would become 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me it was tentatively titled Confessions of a Pop Culture Masochist. Before I became a Juggalo whose idea of heaven is a six and a half hour Phish concert the idea of immersing myself in the worlds of Insane Clown Posse and Phish struck me as deeply masochistic. 

I was wrong! Oh sweet blessed Lord was I ever wrong! I was so wrong that writing that book changed my life and the way I see the world. It made me more open, more empathetic and ultimately more kind. 

My revelatory, transformative experiences following Phish and Insane Clown Posse made me wonder if other widely maligned entertainment were also secretly awesome. It led to projects like watching every single Ernest P. Worrell movie for this here Substack. 

So when I saw that Pauly Shore would be performing in my hometown of Atlanta, the pop culture masochist in me was intrigued. Seeing him perform in 2023 seemed like a very bad, or at least questionable, idea and when my wife expressed an interest in going with me to see the now fifty five year old Weasel from our fuzzy collective past I pulled the trigger and bought us tickets to our first stand-up show since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Shore was playing in a comedy club in Underground Atlanta, a partially underground entertainment complex that always feels empty, creepy and weird. 

The first thing that surprised me about Shore’s act was how filthy it is. Shore delivered a non-stop stream of obscenity and talked endlessly about sex. He talked interracial pornography and human ejaculate and his inability to get and maintain an erection at his age without the assistance of Cialis or Viagra. 

He talked wistfully and longingly about his 1990s heyday, when beautiful women hurled themselves at him en masse because he was handsome and sexy and wildly successful in multiple fields. 

Shore was barely old enough to drink yet he had nevertheless triumphed on television as the boyish face and iconically annoying voice of MTV, in movies like Encino Man and Son in Law and in comedy clubs throughout our great land. 

Here’s the thing about Pauly Shore. No one has lived his life. No one else has lived a life even vaguely comparable to his. No one else grew up the son of one of the most powerful people in stand-up comedy. No one else’s mom was Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore. No one else had Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison and Robin Williams as babysitters when they were kids or personified MTV in their early twenties. 

No one else created a homemade vernacular of surfer hippie slacker slang. No one else has weezed the juice quite like the Weasel. 

So when Shore talked lovingly about the good times it felt like an epic humblebrag. After all there was a time when Shore was a world famous millionaire who starred in movies and TV shows and sold out comedy clubs and yielded joyously to the sexual advances of thousands of groupies. 

Unfortunately for Shore, that time was the early to mid 1990s. Shore achieved pretty much everything an un-ambitious comedian could accomplish but that was a long, long time ago and there’s no way he will ever recapture that level of popularity and influence. 

Shore is consequently doomed to live forever in the endless shadow of his massive early fame. That was the text as well as the subtext of his performance, which leaned into his status as a punchline and a has been. 

If the world is going to treat you like a bad, tacky joke you might as well get some laughs, and some money, out of it. 

The most fascinating moments of Shore’s set were deeply personal and shockingly candid. He talked, for example, about how he wasn’t used to playing big, cosmopolitan cities like Atlanta because he usually played the same small towns as fellow has beens like Loverboy and Rick Springfield. 

Shore said that he played some towns so small that they don’t have a hotel for him to be put up in so he stays in chain motels like Motel 6 or Best Western. In Shore’s telling, comedy club promoters seem surprised that a man who once starred in Hollywood movies would be willing to stay in a sixty dollar a night motel room but then time has a way of humbling all of us, the Weasel most of all. 

The Son-in-Law star would refer to himself in the third person as The Weasel a fair amount as a way of separating the kooky persona that made Shore rich and famous when he was a very young man from the weary, existentially exhausted middle-aged man who has made a living traveling the world telling jokes for decades now. 

Throughout the set Shore would begin a bit of questionable taste, read the room and then stop himself, sheepishly explaining that the joke in question was more of a Macon, Georgia bit, not one for a relatively hip urban audience. 

That did not keep Shore from being habitually inappropriate and casually offensive. He did an extended bit about a gay urologist that seemed to belong to an earlier era and later launched into a bitter riff about women trying to get pregnant so that they could get half of his Encino Man royalties. 

When Shore said something racially problematic, he’d insist that his mother had sex with Richard Pryor so it was okay for him to do racial humor. It was a bit, to be sure, but one that attained an extra potency from the very real possibility that his mother had, in fact, made sweet passionate love to the Superman III star. 

Shore is fifty-five years old, unmarried and has no children. There can be something melancholy and sad about a man that age without children, particularly when they can certainly afford to breed and have spent a long, fruitful career as an emotionally stunted man-child. 

Shore seems to have deliberately chosen to be alone but that can still be a lonely place to be.

The veteran comedian talked about the movie world he used to inhabit and the very different paths his costars Andy Dick, Stephen Baldwin, Brendan Fraser and Sean Astin have taken. 

He had some hack lines I remembered from his poorly conceived political stand-up special Paulytics, like a painful one-liner about going from Weezing the juice to weezing the prune juice but I was surprised at how open and candid and funny and real he was. 

I laughed more at Pauly Shore in one surprisingly entertaining night than I did in the decades leading up to it. But I also found myself relating to him as a profoundly flawed human being. I was not expecting that. 

That’s one of the great things about life. It’s full of surprises. I went to the show expecting to laugh at Pauly Shore. Instead I ended up laughing with him at the absurdity of life in general and the ridiculousness of his remarkable life in particular.