“Weird Al” Yankovic Poster Las Vegas 2019
“Weird Al” Yankovic Poster Las Vegas 2019
Living with a Hernia — Viva Parody!
Like a lot of kids from my generation, “Weird Al” Yankovic was my first real entry point into alternative comedy. This was back when off-center humor wasn’t exactly mainstream. You might catch the occasional Airplane! or Naked Gun flick — or if you were lucky enough to be a kid during the summer of ’84, Top Secret! — but for the most part, the 1980s comedy scene was full of sitcom premises and guys in blazers doing bad Jack Nicholson impressions.
Al was different. He was like a portal to a whole other comic sensibility. If you were a precocious kid who’d ever been called “weird” for existing outside the beige norm, his records were like system updates. He got you. You got him. And he made the world a little easier to laugh at.
It’s a testament to his creative wavelength that he’s still putting out music and selling out venues worldwide more than forty years later. And he’s done it clean — no cheap jokes, no mean-spirited punchlines, always evolving with the times. Al is legend.
So when ten-year-old me finally got the chance decades later to design a poster for his Strings Attached tour — a full-orchestra nationwide run — I knew I had to do something special.
The Concept
Designers were asked to choose a city and theme their art around a song or a suggested theme from a sheet of Yankovician lore (like Al’s Spatula City gag from his 1989 film UHF). I saw “Las Vegas” and immediately thought of “Living with a Hernia”, Al’s parody of James Brown’s Living in America from Rocky IV. In the video, Al perfectly mimics Brown’s iconic stage contortions — which happen to resemble the agony of a hernia.
That gave me the concept: Golden Age Vegas glitz meets soul revue spectacle. I imagined Al as a Vegas showman — part Elvis, part Liberace, part Godfather of Soul — striking the same pose as James on the Star Time album cover, only this time outfitted with a hernia belt, a hot-water bottle, a glittering bathrobe-cape, and, of course, bunny slippers.
Design and Details
The “Weird Al” Yankovic poster Las Vegas places him at the foot of a massive marquee fashioned from his own name — a playful riff on the classic Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. Behind him, the neon skyline glows with inside jokes and Easter eggs, including “Vegas Vic” reimagined as a grimacing Al and faux advertisements listing various hernia types from the song’s lyrics.
The color palette draws from midcentury Vegas — casino greens, cherry reds, and golden yellows — evoking the look of a vintage gaming table under neon lights. The typography, border work, and lightbulb patterning reinforce that 1950s lounge aesthetic while keeping the humor front and center.
Produced as part of Al’s Strings Attached VIP series through Nakatomi Inc, these limited-edition offset prints were given exclusively to Las Vegas ticketholders. A few ultra-limited rainbow foil variants were also released for collectors — a nod to the over-the-top showmanship that defines both Vegas and Al himself.
I’m still incredibly grateful to the fine folks at Nakatomi for letting me be part of such a brilliant poster series. Designing for “Weird Al” was a full-circle moment, one that ten-year-old me would’ve absolutely lost his mind over.
“Weird Al” Yankovic Poster Las Vegas 2019 Specs
• 18” X 24” FOUR COLOR SCREENPRINT
• PRINTED ON ARCHIVAL QUALITY HEAVY PAPER
• EDITION LIMITED TO 50
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I’ve done work for everyone from “Weird Al” to Foo Fighters, Foals to Cut Copy, and bands and festivals ranging in scale from local to international. Contact me using the form below and I’ll be back to you (usually within 24 hours) to talk about what brilliant things we might conjure into being.