Undoubtedly, many Sunday-evening Thanksgiving dinners across the GTA were forced to proceed without the man of the house at the table, as it would appear every white male in the city between the ages of 35 and 55 was at the Air Canada Centre. But if your dad decided to skip the turkey, he at least got a hearty serving of rock 'n' roll's biggest ham.

"I came from the suburbs," a still-svelte, if less golden-godlike David Lee Roth informed us halfway through Van Halen's ACC set, "where they cut down all the trees and name the streets after them." The line came during the solo acoustic intro to "Ice Cream Man," but even if Alex Van Halen was taking a break from behind the kit, it was easy enough to imagine the rim shot. Like much of Roth's stage banter, it's comedy-club-cliched -- but that's exactly what 16,000 of us came to hear.

After Roth left Van Halen back in 1985, the band remained popular, but with the more earnest Sammy Hagar and, later, the even more egregious Gary Cherone at the helm, they became a whole lot less fun. When Van Halen lost Roth, they lost what ultimately made the band stand out from the crop of '80s L.A. hair farmers -- an old-school showbiz cheekiness that's as much Borscht Belt bonhomie as Sunset Strip sleaze. To this day, the onstage relationship between Roth and Eddie Van Halen doesn't resemble the typical Jagger/Richards model so much as that of a ventriloquist and his dummy, with Roth's one-liners and Eddie's guitar squeals conversing in a series of playful calls and responses. If the original Van Halen was occasionally corny, unlike their '80s hard-rock peers, they were never cheesy -- it's no coincidence they didn't start writing power ballads until after Roth left. Likewise, in the wake of Roth's floundering solo career and failed talk-radio stint, you realized how much Diamond Dave needed the VH brothers' authoritative presence to make his shtick stick.

So even if the Roth we see prancing about the spiraling catwalks and elevated platforms at the ACC is missing several inches from his blond locks, his trademark charm and smarm are still in full effect, as he uses the breakdowns in openers "You Really Got Me" and "I'm the One" to hug his once-estranged bandmate Eddie and flash a genuinely incredulous grin that says, "Can you fuckin' believe we're actually doing this?" During the quiet stretch in "Romeo Delight," Roth and Eddie squeal out portions of The Who's "Magic Bus," before Roth cracks, "We're trying to build tension here -- how we doing?" He also doesn't shy away from reminding us that we are watching only "three quarters of the original Van Halen," with founding bassist Michael Anthony not only shut out of this reunion tour (perhaps for his personal allegiances to Hagar), but practically written out of the band's history. In his place, of course, is Eddie's 16 year old son Wolfgang, who not only ably approximates Anthony's thick bass lines and backing harmonies (the secret ingredient of the band's candied hard- rock), but, like Anthony, he also appears to be the only member of Van Halen member who doesn't give a shit about going to the gym.

The first half of the set goes down a storm, with heavy-metal parking-lot perennials like "Running With the Devil" and "Atomic Punk" sounding no less potent than they did 30 years ago, and the band giving equal time to obvious hits ("Dance the Night Away," "Beautiful Girls") and well-chosen album cuts (Van Halen II's "Somebody Get Me a Doctor"). But if Alex's obligatory mid-set drum solo was supposed to allow time for Dave to catch his breath, then it didn't go on long enough, as the melodic nuances of the subsequent "I'll Wait" and "Little Guitars" get lost amid Roth's huffs and puffs. So to that end, Eddie's extended take on "Eruption" -- which saw him hold off on the fret-tapped widdly-widdly bits in favour of prolonged tonal/feedback explorations -- proves crucial, allowing Roth get sufficiently juiced up for a climactic set-closing charge through "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love."

The lights are barely out before the synth overture from 1984 is blasted over the PA, as a prelude to the perfunctory encore of "Jump." The song is, of course, the band's biggest single, but as the preceding set has reminded us, it's also the least representative one. As a show of this reformed line-up's strength, it's also an odd choice to go out on, given that its central riff and solo rely on pre-recorded synths (I would've gone for "On Fire"). But then, to see Roth parade around on the runway in a top hat, waving a massive inflatable microphone in a shower of confetti is a special thing -- because for all his Catskills-comic jocularity, you can see the genuine gratitude of a guy who never thought he'd hear the roar of a packed arena again.

Photograph: Aaron Harris/Canadian Press

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