Comedian Gaffigan packs ’em in at Fiserv Forum
For his latest Milwaukee performance Saturday, comedian Jim Gaffigan had a major venue upgrade.
For a decade, the honorary Milwaukeean (writing partner and wife Jeannie grew up here) has ended his holidays in Brew City with a year-end Pabst Theater residency, usually playing for shy of 5,000 people across a few shows.
On Saturday, the Pabst Theater Group booked him for Fiserv Forum, the Milwaukee Bucks’ new 18,000-seat arena.
For longtime Gaffigan-goers, that may not have felt like a fair trade. Packed theaters generally provide better conditions for comedy than arenas.
To some extent, Gaffigan might even agree. At one point Saturday, he looked up at the jumbotron above the stage and caught himself from an unflattering angle.
“That’s brutal,” he said, half-jokingly. “I don’t need to see that again.”
But the truth is Gaffigan is one of the most popular comedians touring the country today, and he’s been headlining arenas in most markets for a while now.
So despite a long history of playing the 1,300-seat Pabst in Milwaukee, Gaffigan (and I’m guessing the allure of the new $524 million venue) still managed to draw about 12,000 people Saturday. He even performed in the round, with all sections and seats open.
Impressive, yes — and none too surprising, based on the nature of Gaffigan’s comedy, filled with clever observations of everyday life that steer clear of swear words and edgy subject matter.
That was again the case Saturday, where food and family continue to be focal points.
Gaffigan imagined the thoughts of his distraught heart as he stuffed himself with cheese, and talked about traveling without his five kids, saying he had “moments of guilt” and felt “hours of happiness.”
With droll perplexion, he dissected how people could possibly love marathons, how grown adults are treated like children in art museums, and how anyone could go to Las Vegas in summer, where he visited on a 114-degree day (the same temperature as hell, he reasoned, hence the nickname “Sin City.”)
Even material his audience couldn’t directly relate to — like a recap of an encounter with a brown bear on an Alaskan vacation, during which Gaffigan, sunburned, reasoned he looked like a “landlocked salmon” — was performed with an affable, understated, everyman quality.
It was refreshing to see Gaffigan didn’t inflate his mild-mannered Midwestern persona for the large room, and that approach grounded a winning mini meta-set about horses. It featured a Gaffigan staple — the whispered inner voice of the audience — where Saturday Gaffigan imagined people being confused by all the horse jokes, as he continued to tell several more minutes of horse jokes.
There were jokes related to Milwaukee, too — how even a mundane trip to the movies with his relatives involves 30 people, and how people partying on Water Street act like Prohibition just ended. (”They call it Water Street because water is the only thing people don’t drink there,” he joked.)
And at the end of a 68-minute set, Gaffigan resurrected his famous Hot Pockets routine. I suppose it’s like the “Hey Jude” of arena comedy, but it’s still hilarious.
And with the roars of laughter filling Fiserv Forum, it also showed, under the right circumstances, and with the right stand-up, that comedy can actually work quite well in an arena.