Rocky LaPorte
This weekend is a feast when it comes to touring comedians coming to Milwaukee. Providing the finest aged act among them, however, is Rocky LaPorte, who plays 7 and 9 p.m. shows at Potawatomi Hotel and Casino’s Northern Lights Theater Saturday, June 29.
LaPorte has been first gracing late night talk show stages 30 years ago when he performed on Pat Sajak’s and Magic Johnson’s programs. Throughout work including spots in a couple of Tim Allen movies, a Comedy Central special, a 1990 episode of Cheers, his own sitcom pilot and countless comedy club and festival appearances, it's easy to envision LaPorte as the wisecracking Italian American dock worker and truck driver he once was, He's still Italian American, of course, but he can leave much of the heavy lifting to others nowadays.
From a few years ago in Montreal, here LaPorte is delivering zinger after zinger, a couple at the expense of a local animal attraction and his own ethnicity’s stereotypes. See if you cry from laughing hard as I did.
Power of suggestion
If you'd rather your comedy come with the purposeful, if benign, manipulation of audience members’ mental faculties with the power of suggestion, Flip Orley at Fiserv Forum on Saturday, June 29, may be more to your liking. He combines a snappy style of stand-up with hypnosis for shows that can't help but be partially improvisational, as there's no telling what the audience members under Orley's thrall may do.
Instead of appearing in the Forum's main space where the Bucks shoot and score, as have mirth makers such as Jim Gaffigan and Kevin Hart, Orley has been booked in the venue’s more intimate Panorama Club. The smaller space should allow everyone to better see the zaniness the headliner puts his subject through. And because Orley may put adults unaccompanied by children through more risqué scenarios than he would parents with their kids in tow or the kids themselves, he's playing a family friendly show at 5:30 p.m. and one only for grown-ups at 9.
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Clips of Orley concluding or in the middle of his act don't, for me, deliver the yuks they do when one sees the entire arc of his shtick. With that in mind, and in lieu of my usual inclusion of a sample of any given comedian playing in town, here’s Orley, still being pretty funny, in a TV interview explaining what Panorama Club attendees can expect:
This is awkward
Maybe you're not in the mood for straight-up stand-up nor hypnotic hilarity. But if you could go for some laughs from a lady who has recovered from the depths of opioid addiction to become an internet celebrity mommy blogger and wants to inspire others, Tiffany Jenkins could be your best Saturday, June 29, entertainment option. She brings her “This Show Is Awkward AF” tour to the Pabst Theater tomorrow night at 8 p.m. to launch the revised edition of her memoirs, High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict's Double Life. Doubtless she will speak of, as she puts it on her Juggling the Jenkins website and other online platforms, “motherhood, marriage and adulting,” with the same brand of snarky humor with which she recalls her drug-dependent days.
The YouTube account Jenkins has kept active for a couple of years now abounds with bemusement at and tough love for herself, her followers and her two kids, all filtered through the sort of humor that has garnered her nearly 150,000 subscribers there. Here, she bemoans how the internet has made parenting a game of comparisons:
RIP Bullwinkle
Bernard Thomas, better known by his alias of Bishop Bullwinkle, may not have been well-known outside the world of blues and Southern soul music, but he became its reigning comedic star in the past few years. The Floridian may have received his northernmost radio play in Milwaukee, especially on WNOV’s Saturday shows DJ’ed by Mr. Deboe and Ernie G; he also played the city at least twice, once on the annual “The Blues Is Alright” multi-act tour, as a flashy, often foul-mouthed preacher. To commemorate the 70-year-old’s passing earlier this month on Father’s Day, here's the salty pseudo-clergyman’s breakthrough hit, “Hell 2 Da Naw Naw” and its oddly random video...
