Weird Al: Forefather of the YouTube Spoof

When "Weird Al" Yankovic packs for the road, he brings the following items: One red leather Michael Jackson jacket, one foam-rubber double chin, one Segway, one garden hoe, one silver dress suit, five Amish beards, five Jedi robes, and two accordions. That's actually just a partial inventory, as Yankovic employs so many costumes and hairpieces during his shows that a makeshift dressing room must be set up directly behind the stage—a sort of musical-parody triage unit. His performances usually last two and a half hours, and between each song he slips back to this space, where a wardrobe assistant affixes whatever wig or fake appendage he needs for the next number. When he reemerges, he'll have morphed into one of his countless music-video personas: There's Yankovic as the bearded laborer from "Amish Paradise" (a riff on Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise"), as the marble-mouthed grunge singer from "Smells Like Nirvana" (a satire of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), and as the diet-obsessed nag from "Eat It" (a parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It"). At some point, Yankovic will switch into an old bowling shirt or thick, aviator-style glasses, his standard uniform in the '80s and '90s: Yankovic has been imitating others for so long that nowadays he occasionally has to imitate himself.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Yankovic's first music video, "Ricky," in which he reimagined Toni Basil's "Mickey" as an ode to I Love Lucy. The clip introduced the world to an accordion-playing spaz with a coif like Rick James and a voice like an urgent goose. Though many people at the time considered Yankovic to be thoroughly disposable—just another Reagan- era fad, like parachute pants or the Contras—he never went away. In fact, Yankovic had his biggest hit just two years ago, when he reworked Chamillionaire's rap hit "Ridin'" as the geek-pride anthem "White & Nerdy" ("X-Men comics, you know I collect 'em / The pens in my pocket, I must protect 'em"). The song was Yankovic's first track to break the Billboard Top 10.

But Yankovic isn't just popular. He is also the unlikely forefather of the infectious, hyperlinked, quasi-referential comedy that's become the lingua franca of the Web. Yankovic's influence can be seen in the slow-jam pinings of Obama Girl, the cross-cultural pairings that turn Yoda and SpongeBob SquarePants into hardcore rappers, and in the nimble hands of that couch potato who farts out "Bohemian Rhapsody" with his palms (1.8 million YouTube views and counting). You can even detect traces of his style in the perfectly metered wordplay of "Lazy Sunday," the 2005 Saturday Night Live short that earned YouTube—and viral humor—its first barrage of mainstream attention. "Ever since I was old enough to listen to music, I've been listening to Weird Al," says 30-year-old "Sunday" cocreator Andy Samberg. "For my generation, he's a huge influence."

Much like the big-name artists he once so expertly spoofed, Yankovic now inspires not just imitators but also competitors. He'll soon commence work on his 13th studio album, which will have to compete against his own singsongy progeny—the amateur satirists who can devise, record, and edit their own parodies in days, if not hours. To make matters more complicated, whereas Yankovic could once mine such inexhaustible icons as Jackson and Nirvana for laughs, he now has to contend with the likes of Jessica Simpson or Kevin Federline—celebrities who are more or less already self-parodies. Being a music satirist in 2008 is a bit like being a political cartoonist after the Harding administration: too many easy targets, too few sacred idols.

"Back in the '80s, 'Purple Rain' would be number one for half a year," Yankovic says. "You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars. That makes it more difficult for me."

But if there's any wisdom to be divined from Yankovic's success, it's that nothing—not critical slags nor commercial slumps nor a middling creative economy—can quash an ingeniously crafted spoof. "When he struck gold with 'Nerdy,' I thought that was the coolest thing," says musician Ben Folds, who played piano on a cut on Yankovic's album Poodle Hat. "The music-business ship is going down, and Weird Al is standing on the bow, rockin' out."

Yankovic lives in Los Angeles,in a house with a pool in the front and a view of Ricardo Montalban's estate in the back. On a midsummer afternoon, he greets me wearing a polo shirt, jeans, and a pair of Crocs and promptly gives me a tour of his home. Previous tenants include marijuana advocate Jack Margolis and, later, corpulent rapper Heavy D, who left behind a plus-size shower and an industrial-grade oven. Yankovic has heard a rumor that the property was once used as an adult-film set. "That's the history of this place," he says. "Drugs, rap, porn, and the Yankovics."

Yankovic turns 49 in October and remains lithe enough to execute high kicks and back bends during his performances. His hair, graying only slightly, is absolutely volcanic: two long sheaths of curls that are parted down the middle and hang to his shoulders. (He still occasionally grows out his mustache, but in his live act he impersonates Eminem and Taylor Hicks—excess facial hair screws with the verisimilitude.) Most first-time guests are encouraged to ride the Segway used in the "White & Nerdy" video, but alas, it has already been packed away for an upcoming tour. Still, there's no shortage of Yankovic memorabilia, including a closet lined with Hawaiian-print shirts and rows of out-of-production Vans sneakers. At one point, I turn a corner in a hallway and spot a full-size promotional cardboard cutout depicting Yankovic from his mid-'80s period. This is the Al I all but deified back when he was opening his concerts with a gurney and a chain saw (for "Like a Surgeon"), when albums like "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D were stone-cold fourth-grade classics, and when no other performer was so adept at embracing popular culture while simultaneously mocking it.

Near the kitchen there's a life-size Yoda, a leftover from the Star Wars-themed birthday party that Yankovic recently threw for his 5-year-old daughter, Nina. He's been married since 2001 to Suzanne Krajewski, a former film and TV executive he met through Bill Mumy, the Lost in Space child star who's also a part-time novelty musician. "We had this relationship where we talked over the phone for weeks," Yankovic says. "Going to meet her for our first date, I was like, 'I hope she's cute, 'cause I just might marry her.'" Yankovic says this with an abrupt giggle—in fact, he says just about everything with an abrupt giggle and often follows up even the slightest introspective remark with a self-deprecating jab. Before meeting Yankovic, I half-feared he would turn out to be one of those childhood heroes who ages into a twisted, bitter dick. But rest assured: Weird Al is thoroughly, comfortingly awesome.

Raised in the LA suburb of Lynwood, Yankovic's first moment of onstage asininity was the high school valedictory speech he delivered in 1976. "I went into a rant about how the polar ice caps are going to melt and drown us all," he remembers. "It was this crazed Howard Beale kind of thing. People were freaked out." Throughout high school, Yankovic had been recording comedy songs and submitting his cassette demos to Dr. Demento, the novelty-record radio host whose weekly broadcast helped popularize such one-offs as "The Purple People Eater" and "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Demento listened to Yankovic's early tracks, not knowing quite what to make of the fog-thick whir of accordion. "At the time, the accordion was about as unhip as you could get," says Demento, aka Barret Eugene Hansen.

Early Yankovic singles like "Another One Rides the Bus" and "My Bologna" were recorded with minimal orchestration—sometimes just a drumbeat backing Yankovic's playing (today "Bus" sounds like a gypsy-punk number). But because he was cracking wise about junk food and public transportation, the songs were funny even to people who didn't care for the original versions. "Bologna" earned enough national attention to warrant him a onetime deal with Capitol Records for the single. But he struggled to get an album contract.

"Song parodies are considered the lowest form of comedy," Yankovic says. "At the time, labels figured that novelty artists sell singles, not albums, and the record industry wasn't in the business of selling singles." He eventually signed with Scotti Brothers, an independent label distributed by CBS and also home to Survivor and James Brown. Beginning in 1983, Yankovic recorded and released five albums on Scotti, including "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D (featuring the song "Eat It," which earned him a Grammy at the age of 25), Dare to Be Stupid, and his much-heralded response to Michael Jackson's Bad, dubbed Even Worse. All three were a mix of parodies and genre-spoofing original compositions, and all three went platinum. Apparently, plenty of people could relate to Yankovic, even in era when Dagobah jokes were considered a sign of weakness. "I took a lot of shit in school for having a strange sense of humor," says Seth Green, 34, cocreator of Robot Chicken. "Then this guy comes out who's named Weird, and people are loving him. All of a sudden, I can point to someone and say, 'Hey, I'm not the only one who thinks and feels this way.'"

Indeed, Yankovic quickly became an outcast hero, and by the late '80s a good portion of the country's weekly allowance was being spent on the likes of Even Worse. "For a number of years, I was a cash cow for Scotti Brothers," Yankovic says, "which put me in an uncomfortable situation: If they weren't having a good year, it was like, 'Where's the next Weird Al record?'" Occasionally, Yankovic would be coerced into lampooning a particular song, and as a result, his back catalog is not without its share of regrets: "'Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch,'" he sighs, "was parody done under duress."

Yankovic's most fertile targets were global stars—mega-artists like Jackson and Madonna who had distinctive musical and visual styles that Yankovic could exaggerate for effect. "Everybody was watching the same videos," he says of the pre-Laguna Beach era on MTV, when the network functioned as a sort of national radio station. "Viewers memorized every detail, every nuance, which made my job so much easier: If you've got those images ingrained in your head, all you have to do is tweak them a little bit and it's comedy gold."

It might seem ludicrous to treat musical parody as an art form, but in fact there are a few subtle distinctions between Yankovic's material and the countless wacky wake-up-show spoofs that followed in his wake. (Yankovic inspired so many imitators that one fan created the Not Al Page, a fight-the-rip-offs Web site that lists years' worth of misattributed songs.) Consider a tune like 1986's "Living With a Hernia," a send-up of James Brown's "Living in America." Like all Yankovic tracks, it's the result of thorough research. "Before I even begin thinking of jokes, I bombard myself with information," he says. "I could probably still name three or four of the top 10 hernias."

By the end of "Hernia," Yankovic is giving ailment-specific shout-outs like "Epigastric!" and "Richter's hernia!" He has also made a point of avoiding topicality, and so, two decades after the release of "Hernia," there's nothing that dates its humor (except for the era of the original, of course). This is the kind of obsessive dedication that gives his songs an indefinite lifespan. "Ninety percent of all parody songs are terrible," says Paul Scheer, a member of the comedy troupe Human Giant. "But whereas a lot of people just rhyme things and push out words because they sound familiar, Al creates funny juxtapositions and social satire. There's something timeless in the sentiment of the songs. He's kind of like Aerosmith—he'll always have a new group of kids discovering him."

In 1989, Yankovic tried to expand his multimedia lampoonery to film, cowriting and starring in UHF, the story of a low-wattage, lowbrow TV station that broadcasts such gonzo shows as Conan the Librarian and Wheel of Fish. "I had my hopes built up a bit because the movie tested extremely well," he says. "The studio thought, 'Oh, this is going to be our big summer movie.' It tanked and got terrible reviews."

Much like Office Space, UHF needed a few years to gestate before it found its audience. "It's so committed to being ridiculous," SNL's Samberg says. "Yankovic is a good example of a comedian who does really smart-slash-stupid stuff, which a lot of people dismiss as stupid-stupid. I always wished Weird Al had made more movies." Today, UHF's smash-and-grab tactic of jumbling together as many television, film, and music references as possible presages modern viral-video consumption habits; watching it now is a bit like watching YouTube: The Movie.

After UHF flopped, Yankovic waited three years before releasing a new album, by which point perennial marks like Jackson and Madonna were funny enough on their own, turning white and releasing S&M coffee table books. So Yankovic shifted his attention to the frowny denizens of hip hop and alt-rock, which he mined for such hits as "Amish Paradise" and "Smells Like Nirvana." The former song inspired a Behind the Music segment about Yankovic's feud with Coolio—exaggerated, Yankovic says—while the latter prompted a mash note from its victim. "Yankovic," Kurt Cobain wrote in a journal entry from the early '90s, "is America's modern pop-rock genius." ("I don't know if he was being facetious or what," Yankovic says now.)

He has always made it a policy to be sure the original artists sign off on his parodies, and by the '90s, most musicians had come to view being spoofed by Yankovic as a career milestone. The songs are also a source of further profit—Yankovic splits his royalties with the songwriters. But Yankovic's 2003 album, Poodle Hat, was crippled when Eminem refused to authorize a video for a "Lose Yourself" parody called "Couch Potato." Yankovic had already secured permission for the song, but Eminem nixed the video at the last minute. "I didn't have a direct line to him," Yankovic says. "I couldn't pick up the phone and say, 'Hey man, what's your problem?'" Poodle Hat would be Yankovic's lowest-selling effort in almost two decades, and though he could still book months-long tours, it seemed that Yankovic was becoming a nostalgia act.

Then, in the middle of this commercial lull, his parents died from carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of a closed fireplace flue. Yankovic got the news while he was on tour—he had a show scheduled for that evening in Appleton, Wisconsin. He went onstage anyway, continuing the tour for nearly seventy tour dates.

"It wound up being a good thing for me to continue working through it," he says. "Because if I didn't have anything to distract me, I probably would have spiraled into an even deeper depression. For a couple of hours each night, I could go onstage and put on a big fake smile and pretend like everything was just OK."

A few days after my visit to Yankovic's house, we're in the Las Vegas airport, where he has arrived to begin a 47-stop summer tour. As he walks through baggage claim, he points to a casino advertisement featuring the grinning visage of Carrot Top. "Remember how I told you that music parody was the lowest form of comedy?" he says. "I forgot about prop comics."

The next day, we're at the Henderson Pavilion, a 6,000-person concert hall about 13 miles from the Strip. Yankovic heads to his dressing room to get ready; meanwhile, I wait in the Pavilion hallway. A group of stormtroopers loiter nearby, helmets in hand. He enlisted members of the 501st Legion—"the world's definitive Imperial Costuming Organization"—to perform a kick line during "The Saga Begins," his 1999 Lucasfilm homage, and the troopers are going over their cues. Darth Vader is here, too, but just as we're talking about Yankovic's exalted stature within the Star Wars community, the Sith Lord is interrupted by a cell phone call.

Shortly after 8 pm, Yankovic walks to the front of the stage, accordion in hand and one eyebrow raised deviously. For the most part, he'll play recent material, along with a few early hits like "Eat It" and "Yoda." But the highlight of the evening is when Yankovic dons a red doo-rag, Segways onto the stage, and proceeds to rap "White & Nerdy." The audience members—most of whom fit the song's titular demographic—let out a cheer and start head-bobbing awkwardly to the music.

Just when he needed it, "Nerdy" gave Yankovic a pan-generational hit—a song that not only appealed to younger listeners but also reminded first-wave fans that they hadn't outgrown a well-placed Star Trek joke. When the song was released in 2006, more than seven years had elapsed since Yankovic's last big single, a pre-Poodle Hat spoof of Puff Daddy's " It's All About the Benjamins," dubbed "It's All About the Pentiums." Like that song, "Nerdy" intertwined the languages of both hip hop and the Web, two entities that barely existed when Yankovic started his career but that have since replaced pop music and television as his favorite muses.

Indeed, while Yankovic released "Pentiums" primarily through traditional channels like MTV and VH1, "Nerdy" debuted on the Internet. His video for the single was a bombardment of geek lifestyle jokes (making edits to Wikipedia, pointing to the rims on his Prius), and it went viral instantly. It remains a fixture among YouTube's most-viewed clips.

But that's just the problem: The Internet celebrates his dorky inclinations and his videos—just as it celebrates anyone with a song gag and a webcam. Today on YouTube you can find homemade parodies of everything from Usher's "Love in This Club" ("Scrub in the Tub," "Lunch in This Pub") to Rihanna's "Umbrella" ("My Nutella"). This situation is complicated by the demise of the megastar: Hit songs are now heard by fewer people, and they come and go much more quickly. Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" may have been a chart-topper—but only for a matter of weeks, not months.

"Nerdy" succeeded anyway, and to understand why, it helps to look at the zip file that Yankovic forwarded me before we got to the Henderson. It contained hundreds of pages of lyrics, notes, and various working drafts of the songs on his latest album, Straight Outta Lynwood. In the final version of "White & Nerdy," Yankovic sings that he's "Got people beggin' for my top eight spaces / I know pi to a thousand places." Earlier versions include: "Got people killin' for my top eight spaces," "Gotta lotta Hobbits in my top eight spaces," "Got Stephen Hawking in my top eight spaces." All told, there are more than 200 unused lines for "White & Nerdy." By the time he was finished, he'd reclaimed Chamillionaire's original so thoroughly, listeners didn't even need to know "Ridin'" to appreciate "Nerdy."

But diligence and high-production videos take time, and the industry that once spurned him as a singles artist has itself shifted toward quick-hit singles. Yankovic's years-long lag between albums now seems like an eternity, especially when compared with the first responders on the Web, who can work up a spoof—even if it's bad—before the flavor of the month has come and gone. "If anybody writes a bad review," Yankovic says, "the first thing they say is, 'He's doing Pussycat Dolls songs? Are they still relevant?'"

Toward the end of the Henderson show, Yankovic slips into the changing area and an assistant pulls out his final, most daunting costume of the night: the "Fat" suit. For those who have never seen Yankovic's Grammy-winning "Fat" video, the "Fat" suit is a pear-shaped wonder, a black ensemble adorned with excess buckles and zippers. The finishing touch is a grotesque prosthetic triple chin. Once transformed, Yankovic looks a bit like Tweedledee—if Tweedledee landed a job at a biker bar.

As the song's vamping bass line starts, Yankovic waddles his way through the curtain and executes a series of groin-grabs choreographed to cartoon sound effects. By this point in the evening, he's been running around in the hot desert air for almost two hours, but here he is, flailing about under layers of foam rubber, a roly-poly monument to comedic dedication.

A few days after the show, I search for a clip of the "Fat" performance on YouTube. Instead, I find a video of two teens in their living room, lip-syncing the song while wearing suspiciously puffy-looking sweatshirts. There are dozens of "Fat" reenacters on the Web, few old enough to remember the derision that used to greet Yankovic and his purposefully goofy parodies. As strange as it may seem, Yankovic is now an icon, and these kids are his pun-loving progeny: They will eagerly stuff a few pillows under their clothes, dance around the room, film it, then upload the results to YouTube for the rest of the world to see.

Like Weird Al, they dare to be stupid.

Brian Raftery (brianraftery@gmail.com) wrote about ROFLcon, the gathering of viral Web celebrities, in issue 16.07.