Pauly Shore hits town for stand-up show

Pauly Shore has been tooling around middle America on his latest comedy tour and will soon make a stop in Southeast Missouri.

Shore will perform Sunday at The Venue. Debbie Atchison, director of events at The Venue, said she's working with an agent who represents several comedians to plan a monthly or bimonthly comedy night. She said they were running down a list of people when the agent mentioned Shore.

"I said, You've got to get him here,'" she said.

Shore has been performing in Kentucky and Iowa and has a few St. Louis-area shows before his performance in Cape Girardeau.

Aside from the comedy circuit, he's promoting "Adopted," a mockumentary about celebrities adopting children from Africa. Shore said he went to South Africa to do a few stand-up shows and wanted to make a movie about the trip.

"I wanted to film a movie because I thought it would be cool to, like, have me be in Africa," he said. "Kind of messing around with the giraffes and lions and stuff."

He changed his mind and started filming "Adopted," which documents Shore's fake attempt to adopt a child from South Africa. The film uses child actors, but most of the other people are unaware of the loose script and simply react to Shore.

"Once I got down there, I kind of came up with the idea and I just went for it," he said.

According to Shore, his spontaneity is a part of what keeps his comedy popular. While he relies less on personas like The Weasel character he made popular in the early 1990s, his material still has a few outbursts.

"I kind of still have that. Like what's he going to say?" he said. "You practice and practice, and then stuff just kind of happens."

Shore said he burned out on stand-up about 10 years ago, but he kept busy -- and still supplements his time on the road -- by working in movies. He moved from starring in films like "Son-in-Law" and "Bio-Dome" to writing, directing and producing, though he said he didn't plan it that way.

"At the end of the day I think it's really about the work and the love and the passion for doing it," Shore said. "I think that kind of led me into producing, directing and writing."

Mockumentaries "Pauly Shore is Dead" and "Adopted" and his sketch comedy special "Natural Born Comics" have kept his work light, but Shore hopes his next cinematic endeavor will be much darker.

He wrote and plans to star in an urban thriller about a trust fund baby in Las Vegas whose mother dies and father remarries. The character decides his new stepmother is the cause of his troubles and kills her. He then starts killing women who come to Las Vegas to cheat on their spouses.

Shore is also working on a deal with MTV for "The Shorz," which he said is a "reality show about a family that most people don't know that I have."

Shore will perform with Sandy Danto opening at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at The Venue. Tickets are $25.50 and available at P-Mac Music and River Radio or can be purchased at the door.