Pauly Does Dallas (1992)

Starring: Pauly Shore
Grade: D

Before he ends the special with a final song, Pauly Shore’s final lines to the crowd have an eerie foreshadowing:

“…just cause I’m not on MTV every day, you’re not going to forget me, are you? You promise?”

The crowd promises, but looking back on it now, I can’t help but think that the people didn’t follow through on said promise.

Summary

As we see Pauly Shore come to the stage to get ready (while accompanied with a black-and-white aesthetic for anything not on stage throughout the special), he makes a massive entrance to a raucous crowd, dancing to The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Voodoo Child”. He takes it all in, and the crowd is loving every second of it. Soon after, he starts to talk about how he used to be a loser that was into dancing and how he’s always been in trouble for going after girls, even getting punched in the face for flirting with the quarterback’s girlfriend in high school. After he touches on Spanish class, we see the first of many cutaway scenes where Shore is experiencing things on his tour.

As I mentioned before, all of these cutaways are in black-and-white.

The first is him getting a physical at the request of HBO. We go back into his set for a moment where he talks about being famous now and how’s able to chase women and get into clubs he wasn’t able to before. Then, we go back to another cutaway where Shore leaves his tour bus to visit a superfan that wrote to him two years ago in Bucksnort, Tennessee. The family is very much reminiscent of one that wouldn’t be out place in the cast of Son in Law. He even goes fishing with the young girl that wrote him.

During his set, he talks about being a stoner and how things came to be. Following this, we cut to Shore flirting with a desk clerk at a hotel he wasn’t even staying in. After talking about if “The Weasel” himself was President of the United States, we cut to Shore visiting an Elvis Presley Museum and Gift Shop. This is where he talks about a little bit of history he has with “The King” relating to his father touring with him, and we get to see him interact with some fans.

Next, Shore goes on about college and partying, and we see this random cutaway of some local who almost acts as a witch doctor, blessing Shore in front of a crowd of people. Following this strange sequence, we go back to his routine where he talks about Pee-wee Herman getting caught jerking off in that theater, and Shore himself getting caught by his own ex-girlfriend jerking off and her accusing him of cheating (which wasn’t nearly as funny as this crowd seems to believe). We see him hang with street performers, some random woman he tries banging, and another woman he tries dancing with at a bar. This is all interspliced with moments during his routine where he tells a somewhat somber poem about his mentor Sam Kinison, girls giving head (and one woman stinking a finger in Shore’s ass and him liking it), and a whole bit about sex positions. After a cutaway where he hits on some old lady, he talks about condoms and the potential for them to break.

We see Shore meet another fan and he goes as far as taking a bath in their house, running outside naked afterwards for whatever reason. Back in his set, he talks about his idea for a stoner-focused airlines that’s just plain idiotic. Next, we see him working out during the tour. His big finale is him inviting some random guy on stage to sing Van Halen’s version of “You Really Got Me” while he plays the drums. It’s pretty horrible, despite Shore’s impressive drum skills. Once the guy stage dives into the crowd, Shore abruptly ends the show.

After a quick cutaway with him flirting with more groupies, he jumps back on stage in full Cowboys gear and does a rendition of his song “Lisa, Lisa, the One I Adore”, and it’s interspliced with other performances of the song (in black-and-white) elsewhere during the tour. If the song wasn’t so terribly unfunny, this would’ve been a cool sequence. The show ends with him running backstage to no women in his dressing room and being disappointed and him interacting with fans through the credits.

My Thoughts:

I’ve gone on record in saying how big of a fan I am of Pauly Shore, but I have to admit that this was a weak showing of stand-up. His personality is upbeat and unpredictable, his energy is infectious, and his interviews and movies are entertaining because of his persona and delivery. However, his stand-up has always been subpar. Pauly Does Dallas is a great way to show the enigmatic presence of Shore, and why “The Weasel” was so popular for the time period. The audience loves him. He dresses like a rockstar and acts like one, and his carefree style speaks volumes for the MTV crowd that hung onto every word he said in the way he said it. It’s just that the actual comedy isn’t very good if you sit down and listen. Truthfully, you’d be hard pressed to find a single punchline in this entire special. The entire joke is the way he talks, and the audience likes what he does because they know him for being the Hollywood “surfer” dude.

As far as this audience is concerned, he got away with it.

This whole special is very much like MTV during the 1990s. It’s random, silly, and possesses a careless vibe of craziness. With a charming and funny presence like Shore leading the charge, it’s no wonder why he collected such a fanbase during this time. Shore is a charismatic guy, and as we see him in his cutaways talking about his tour and hanging out with fans and women, he’s the guy you want to party with. We even watch how he does shots and drinks with his fans on stage because he has to keep his shtick up, and it forces him to work out harder during his tour. There was a level of dedication to his persona that I can’t help but admire. As much as I didn’t laugh, which is the main reason why this stand-up special is graded so low, it was still worth watching to see “The Weasel” reap the benefits of being this fun-loving rockstar character comedian. Despite the general consensus of the piss-poor joke writing of this special, my opinion of Pauly Shore didn’t go any lower.

With that being said, the ending of the actual routine was terrible, though the end credits were still cool to see. Oddly enough, the best part of the special was the documentary-like bits in-between. I have a feeling Shore noticed this too when filming the actual documentary Pauly Shore Stands Alone in 2014, a fantastic movie I recommend.

Very few were as fun and cool as Pauly Shore in the 90s. If you wanted a little history lesson on why Shore’s name still has recognition today, Pauly Does Dallas is a good example to show how big he was at one point. Even though he tells very few actually good jokes, the crowd still chants “weasel” and laugh and cheer at the outrageous antics of the person throughout. It won’t make you a fan, but it’ll show you why people were. The man was just a goofball, and he was damn good at it.