Do people enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic because he’s funny or because he’s not that funny? The comedian, who specializes in song parodies, just released his fourteenth studio album, “Mandatory Fun,” which features his class-clown mangling of hits by Lorde, Iggy Azalea, and Pharrell Williams, among others. It débuted at No. 1, selling more than a hundred thousand copies in its first week. Considering the post-digital slump in music sales—a hit album a decade ago could sell as many as a million copies in a week; this year, Sia’s “1000 Forms of Fear” entered the charts at No. 1 by selling only fifty-two thousand copies—this might be the biggest first week for a comedy album ever. But what is it that Weird Al actually does? I don’t laugh at his songs, yet I’m delighted by his presence in the world of pop culture. With his parodic versions of hit songs, this somehow ageless fifty-four-year-old has become popular not because he is immensely clever—though he can be—but because he embodies how many people feel when confronted with pop music: slightly too old and slightly too square. That feeling never goes away, and neither has Al, who has sold more than twelve million albums since 1979.
Anxiety starts early for pop audiences. For decades, I have had twenty-somethings tell me that they don’t know what’s on the charts, haven’t listened to any new artists since college, and don’t “know anything about music.” They feel confused by how quickly the value of their knowledge of what’s current fades. Weird Al’s songwriting process, almost without exception, is to confront that anxiety and to celebrate it. Yankovic will take a mysterious and masterful song and turn it into something mundane and universal. He makes the grand aspirational concerns of teen-agers in Lorde’s “Royals” into a story that includes a lesson about the hygienic advantage of taking food home in aluminum foil. (You’ll see the rhyme there.) Charli XCX’s boast of being “classic, expensive, you don’t get to touch,” in Azalea’s “Fancy,” becomes an ad for a handyman who can resurface your patio in Yankovic’s “Handy.”
The opening lyrics of “Smells Like Nirvana,” Yankovic’s 1992 version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” are as close to a mission statement as he has: “What is this song all about? Can’t figure any lyrics out. How do the words to it go? I wish you’d tell me, I don’t know.” Weird Al has been cool for so long because pop makes everybody feel uncool; that he is the only one to admit it has made him a pop star. What’s strange is how frequently the musicians whom Weird Al parodies feel blessed, as if some kind of comic Pope had waved at them. Williams, for instance, told Yankovic that he was “honored” to give him permission to do a take on his hit “Happy.”
Yankovic grew up in Lynwood, a suburb of Los Angeles, and learned the accordion as a child, playing polka and other genres. Inspired by satirists like Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman—the previous No. 1 comedy album was Sherman’s “My Son, the Nut,” in 1963—Yankovic began to create his own parodies. As his Twitter bio succinctly says, he’s “the Eat It guy.” In 1984, his version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” seemed almost as popular as Jackson’s original and, on MTV, made a star out of a goofball with bad glasses, curly hair (longer now, but still not gray), and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. Jackson sang about the pointlessness of violence; Yankovic used the handiest rhyme available and turned “Beat It” into a song about finishing your dinner. His video re-creates Jackson’s famous red-leather style and adds gang members armed with utensils, which was sufficient to push Yankovic’s song up to No. 12 on the Billboard singles chart and earn him a Grammy.
Musical verisimilitude is part of what Yankovic provides—it’s a form of comfort that’s slightly different from comedy. With his producers and musicians, Yankovic comes up with songs that can function, in a pinch, as stand-ins for the original. He was as good at re-creating Jackson and Quincy Jones’s dance-rock production (itself a slightly out-of-touch reading of the rock music of the era) as he is at mimicking the minimal beat made by the Invisible Men and the Arcade for Azalea’s “Fancy.” For those who feel ashamed to play a chart hit, or possibly even hate the chart hit, Yankovic offers an opportunity to have your cake and eat it. None of these parodies would work with weak songs; he chooses ones with strong melodies and distinct personalities. If you feel out of your element listening to a hip-hop song about flying around the world and cleaning out minibars, you can still enjoy the shape of Azalea’s song by listening to “Handy.” You’re probably not going to do this publicly if you’re over the age of ten, but then no song will sell this many copies in one week to pre-teens alone. There are many people listening to Weird Al on headphones at work, which makes sense, because Yankovic is never disrespectful of the music; what he’s sending up is the idea that he would ever be cool enough to live in the world the music came from.
He did, however, come close to transcendent coolness when he released videos for all the songs on “Mandatory Fun,” as Beyoncé did last year with her self-titled, out-of-the-blue album; several writers pointed out the parallel. In fact, Yankovic had done that before, for “Alpocalypse,” from 2011. The only real similarity with Beyoncé is that each video has obviously been carefully planned and has its own, distinct tone. The videos have been a core part of his approach from the beginning, and this album is no different. In fact, I often find that I encounter Weird Al’s music through videos rather than through singles on the radio or through full-length albums.
The video for “Word Crimes,” which has been viewed more than twelve million times on YouTube, is a good example of another appealing aspect of Yankovic’s work: a soft and goofy sweetness. The original song, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” was a huge hit in 2013, despite the suspicion that the music was a shameless rip-off of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” (Litigation is ongoing.) Thicke’s lyrics centered on his deciding for an unnamed woman that “I know you want it,” which, if not criminally coercive, sounded extremely creepy. Yankovic’s video turned the video for Thicke’s song, a display of barely clad models, into an animated lesson on avoiding grammatical crudeness. Brackets and exclamation points dance as Yankovic defines contractions and counsels against using “c” to mean “see.” But Yankovic never comes off as a scold. Every aspect of his art is enthusiastic and cheerful, a throwback to an earlier era of comedy and pop culture, when lightness had validity. Now every fairy-tale princess and superhero has to be drenched in blood, watching a city collapse in a fake orgasm of C.G.I. overload. Standup comedians these days are more likely to plumb the depths of their emotional dysfunction than they are to wear trick costumes or do imitations. Yankovic is comforting in the way of Bugs Bunny, or early Steve Martin.
Or in the way of “The Dr. Demento Show,” which I listened to as a kid, and on which Yankovic first aired his parodies, in the seventies. Working in a wild and wacky tone that made me cringe even then, the syndicated late-night d.j. who called himself Dr. Demento played comedy acts like the Firesign Theatre and parodies like Yankovic’s. Though I eventually left behind what felt like kid stuff, kid stuff is another way of describing a thing that we know, that feels familiar and unthreatening. In a time of complete unrest, even the darkest and most grownup person will reach for something sweet and unchallenging. Funny voices and kazoos and accordions and polka serve not to entertain or delight us so much as to reassure us. Thank God, then, for the medley on Yankovic’s new album, which folds in hits by anxiety-provoking young acts like Miley Cyrus and One Direction: “Now That’s What I Call Polka!” ♦
Watch Sasha Frere-Jones’s commentary on Weird Al’s music videos.
