New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘Pale Tourist’ goes to Canada, Spain in 2-part special
Jim Gaffigan was on track to draw Connecticut fans to several shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York July 23-25, but now the doughy comic will try for late September due to COVID restrictions. Gaffigan fans can take heart, however, with his new two-part, two-location streaming TV special in the meantime.
Gaffigan wields a full belt of standup tools, from mugging a funny character voice to commenting on his own jokes in a whisper like a thought in the mind of an audience member.
But he’s also one of the most clever mainstream comics in the world, and he proves it in a twopart Amazon Prime Video package filmed in Kichener, Ontario, Canada and Barcelona, Spain that lands on the streaming service Friday, July 24.
The two hour-long specials were filmed as part of Gaffigan’s The Pale Tourist worldwide tour, in which he traveled the world — in each country meeting people, eating the food, and learning a bit about the history — until the pandemic interrupted the live shows, that is.
“Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist” features the Grammynominated, Emmy-winning comic and best-selling author on a quest to spend some time in a another country and create material based on the culture, food and geography. Though the Spanish half takes a bit more time to hit high gear, both audiences enjoy a fairly steady stream of hearty laughs as Gaffigan has fun with the pronounciation of Regina, the capital city of the Canadian province of
Saskatchewan. “Everything in Regina sounds sexual,” he says during a funny series of jokes.
He also scores with observations about Canadian airport codes making no sense (YYZ for Toronto), the cold in Winnipeg, the odd time zone in Newfoundland, those Canadian Tire stores, youth hockey leagues staying in every Canadian hotel, and the Nova Scotia, meal item called donair (spicy beef in a sort of pita wrap).
If you’ve had Canadian friends, you know the stereotype about them being nice is pretty much true. Which of course Gaffigan deftly uses at one point.
The Spanish hour gets a bit edgy with references to the Spanish
explorers and Gen. Francisco Franco, but Gaffigan wins this English-speaking crowd over with bits on siesta naps, loud talkers in Spain, the continued popularity of smoking there, bullfights, gazpacho soup and the arguably goofy holiday custom in Catalonia of Caga Tió.
Gaffigan has been a tough ticket to score in live shows nationally for a few years, not to mention TV specials and parts in eight films opening in the past year, including “Troop Zero,” “Being Frank,” “Them That Follow” and “American Dreamer.”