The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Al-pocalypse now
Parody master Yankovic gets a big new spotlight with release of Roku Channel’s largely fictional biopic ‘Weird’
“Weird Al” Yankovic quit his most recent day job in 1983. ¶ By then, he was a few years out of college and his self-titled debut album was already in stores. But he was still working a minimum-wage gig at the radio network Westwood One, where his duties included daily post-office runs. One day he pulled a Billboard magazine from the mailbag. ¶ “I opened it up,” he says, “and there’s my song” — it was “Ricky,” his “I Love Lucy”-themed parody of Toni Basil’s 1982 hit “Mickey” — “on the chart.” ¶ “Ricky” would rocket all the way to No. 63 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and no further — but the fact that it had charted at all still felt like a sign. ¶ “I think that very day I gave my notice,” Yankovic says. “I said, ‘Well, maybe I should be full-time Weird Al, see how this thing pans out.’”
When asked when being full-time Weird Al started to feel like a viable career, Yankovic, who just turned 63, says, “I think about three months ago.”
Which is, y’know, a joke. Yankovic is far and away the most successful comedy recording artist of all time. He’s sold more than 12 million albums. His last album, “Mandatory Fun,” was the first comedy album in history to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — and the first one to top that chart at all since Allan Sherman dropped “My Son, the Nut” in 1963. It went on to win Yankovic his fourth Grammy Award — of what are now five — in 2015.
He’s stepped back from recording these days to focus on other endeavors, like “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a hilariously counterfactual sendup of the prestige-biopic genre, now available on the Roku Channel. The film stars “Harry Potter” actor Daniel Radcliffe as Yankovic.
But he’s also recording less and less these days because writing hit-song parodies has become a tougher racket. His first EP came out in 1981, the same year MTV debuted; for years, the video channel defined who was famous and what was a hit song, and Yankovic wrote parodies accordingly, sending up whatever came down the monocultural pike — synth-pop, heavy metal, hip-hop, grunge and two successive generations of Cyruses.
In the age of the microniche, it’s harder to know what songs to make fun of.
“There’s still major superstars and big hits,” Yankovic says, “but it’s not as easy to discern as it was a couple years ago.”
In the ’80s, pressure made him prolific.
“I felt like I had to keep grabbing that brass ring,” Yankovic says, “because I was scared to death. It was drilled into my head that because I do comedy music I’m a quote-unquote novelty artist, and historically novelty artists have been onehit wonders.”
Instead Yankovic has defied that conventional wisdom by recording dozens of hits — not to mention outlasting the cultural relevance of many of the artists he’s parodied, from Greg Kihn to El DeBarge to Crash Test Dummies to Taylor Hicks to Iggy Azalea.
This may be the weirdest thing about Weird Al in 2022, nearly 40 years after “Ricky”: He’s become a legacy artist.
His appeal now transcends generations. Evan Rachel Wood, who plays a highly fictionalized version of Madonna in “Weird,” says she learned about Yankovic from her mother. Not long ago, Wood took her 9-yearold to one of Yankovic’s shows for the first time.
“He’s not somebody who uses swear words or does things that aren’t familyfriendly,” Wood says, “yet it somehow always feels like he’s pushing the envelope and being weird and grotesque. I think that’s one reason he’s been able to stay in it so long.”
Barry Hansen, the DJ far better known as Dr. Demento, was the first person to play Yankovic’s music on the radio. The song was “Belvedere Cruising,” an ode to Yankovic’s ’64 Plymouth. It was March 1976, and Yankovic was still a student at L.A.’s Lynwood High School. He went on to be the most-played artist in the history of Hansen’s show, which started out in syndication on radio and continues online. For most novelty songwriters, making it into Demento’s rotation is the pinnacle; for Yankovic, it was only the beginning.
“It’s inspiration and perspiration,” Hansen says when asked why Yankovic beat the odds. “His inspiration didn’t run out after one big hit, and he works very, very hard at it. He and Frank Zappa are the two people who worked hardest at making funny music that have ever lived — Spike Jones worked hard at it, but not as hard as Weird Al.”
“Weird” is not Yankovic’s first shot at the movie business. He also starred in the 1989 comedy “UHF” with David Bowie, Fran Drescher and and many others. He co-wrote the film with his manager, Jay Levey. It’s now considered the kind of cult classic people write oral histories about; in 1989, it was not quite as appreciated. When I tell Yankovic I saw the film the day it opened, he replies, “You’re the one!”
After the movie bombed, he says, “I won’t say that I fell into a spiral of depression, but I was pretty bummed out.”
Years later, in 2010, Yankovic and writer-director Eric Appel made a fake trailer for an overwrought and self-serious Weird Al biopic with “Breaking Bad’s” Aaron Paul playing Al and comedian Patton Oswalt as Dr. Demento. It was an instant viral hit on Funny or Die; but Yankovic had no plans to expand on the trailer, because, he says, “I didn’t want to come back after 33 years with another bomb.”
But then came a new wave of real rock biopics, including “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which played like a parody without any jokes and somehow won a few Oscars. The more Yankovic thought about the biopic genre, the riper it seemed for parody, and one morning about 2 ½ years ago, Yankovic woke up and sent an email to Appel, suggesting that maybe they should expand that fake trailer into a full-fledged fake movie.
Appel is 42 — a secondgeneration Al fan whose mom showed him “Eat It” on MTV when he was 4 years old, which led to him seeing “UHF” in the theater (“I made my grandpa take me to it, and I think he fell asleep. He was like, ‘I fought in a war— what are you making me sit through?’”) and eventually to a career in comedy, as well as directing jobs on “New Girl,” “Silicon Valley” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” When he and Yankovic started writing together, Appel was impressed by his partner’s seriousness.
“I come from an improv background,” Appel says. “It’s very loosey-goosey. Al has a mathematical brain. Our writing sessions together weren’t just a big, goofy pitch-fest where you’re bouncing around the room. There was quite a bit of quiet contemplation.”
Part of the reason Yankovic’s song parodies work so well, Appel points out, is that they’re usually note-perfect re-creations of the source material, right up until Al starts singing about food or ducks or surgery. “That’s the approach we took to the movie,” Appel says. “The only way to do a Weird Al biopic is to make it feel like a really dramatic biopic but the words are different.”
The result is a precise satire of rock biopics as a genre and the absurd liberties these films take with truth and time, particularly when it comes to the creative process. Both Appel and Yankovic mention the scene in “Ray” where Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles, arguing with his pregnant mistress, comes up with the hook to “Hit the Road Jack” in a matter of seconds; in “Weird,” young Al hears his roommate say something about lunchmeat, and within the hour, Al’s new song “My Bologna” is on the radio and climbing the charts.
Radcliffe says it was this absurdly over-the-top approach that made him want to do the film. When the script came to him, he says, “I was confused. I was a Weird Al fan, and I was like, ‘That’s cool and very flattering that he would think of me. But surely there are people that are closer to him physically,’ and all those things. And then I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh, right — it doesn’t matter.’ I was thinking, ‘I’m probably going to say yes to this’ from around Page 4.”
In real life, Yankovic upends every cliché about damaged, angry, approvalhungry comedians. On Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, traditionally a forum for the airing of funny people’s psychic wounds, Yankovic was the rare guest with almost nothing to declare — notwithstanding the loss of his parents, who died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in their home in 2004, when Yankovic was 44.
After college, Yankovic worked for Dr. Demento for a little while, and Hansen got a glimpse of Yankovic’s creative process.
“He would research his songs,” Hansen says. “He carried around a big, blue loose-leaf notebook everywhere he went for a while, until laptops were a thing. He would write down ideas for songs. Fragments. And he’d go to the library. Like when he wrote the song ‘I Want a New Duck,’ he told me he spent an afternoon in the library just researching ducks.”
Yankovic’s early work also had a deranged energy to it. The original 1979 version of “My Bologna,” cut in a men’s bathroom at Cal Poly, feels spiritually connected to L.A. punk from around the same time. Yankovic says he “definitely felt a kinship” with punk and new wave. In their own way, both he and the punks were puncturing the self-seriousness that crept into rock ‘n’ roll as the form grew more gentrified.
But when I mention to Yankovic that rock critic Chuck Eddy once referred to Al’s parody “Smells Like Nirvana” as “the only honest rock criticism that Nirvana ever received,” he winces a little. He points out that “Smells Like Nirvana” — which Kurt Cobain is on record as having loved, even though it portrays him as an inarticulate marble mouth — was a rare example of a Yankovic parody that directly mocks the original artist.
Yankovic would rather leave criticism to critics and mockery to “morning zoo” hosts.
“Some people who do song parodies, their whole thesis in the song is, ‘This band sucks. This artist sucks. This song sucks,’” Yankovic says. “That gets old after a while.”