A hilarious introduction to Yankovic’s work is “I lost on Jeopardy,” one of his earliest songs, a parody of a song “Jeopardy” by the Gregg Kihn Band. Listen to the quiet plaintiveness of this recording, quite a contrast to the loud carrying on of most comic songs of the past.
One of the first songs I remember from him is “Like a Surgeon,” (spoofing Madonna’s Like a Virgin, if you don’t know already). That was back when I still had TV service ---we don’t get over-the-air TV where we live--- and saw the video on MTV, or whatever the family watched back then. I must admit that Weird Al had a genius for physical comedy, and his videos often, if not invariably, picked up on segments in the original music video to caricature.
Another memorable spoof is “Eat It”, a send-up of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Weird Al also selects just the right little fillips to give stand-out places in whichever original recording he is spoofing; in the case of Madonna’s song, the little cry she attaches to the phrase “Like a virgin—(cry)—touched for the very first time …” Weird Al adds a cry in the same spot, with a little extra edge to it. You can never listen to Madonna’s song with a straight face ever again. In the case of Beat It, where Michael Jackson interjects “Oh Lord…” Weird Al says “Oh lard,” if you listen closely. This fits in with the theme of the spoof---parents insisting on their kids finishing their food: “have a banana—have a whole bunch; it doesn’t matter what you had for lunch, just eat it!”
The spoofs are multi-dimensional. Not only is there an incredible (and hilarious) contrast between the subject-matter of the original song and the spoof, the lyrics of the spoof are just over the top funny in their own right, even if you’ve never heard the original. The performance of the spoof is brilliant; it mimics the original closely enough to make the spoof musically non-trivial, to begin with, but he (and his team, whoever they are) adds just a little here and there to send up the original beautifully.
In the instrumentation, too, there’s humor; in place of the heavy orchestration in some songs, Weird Al makes do with the skillful use of accordion and synthesizer. Using an accordion for spoofs is widespread; somehow it seems to make people laugh. (Weird Al’s father is a well-known accordionist and Polka player with his own much-recorded band.) [Added later: evidently Frank Yankovic, to whom I referred, is no relation. I stand corrected.] The seventies band They Might Be Giants, for instance, features an accordion in their funniest songs. The decadent MacArthur Park by Richard Harris is a wonderful ---if slightly self-indulgent---song that has a sort of opium dream quality to it; Weird Al’s spoof is called Jurassic Park, and is a commentary on the movie of that name in addition to being a spoof of the song. In this case it is the relationships of the ideas in all three things that is amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny. Jurassic Park is, understandably, more of a nightmare than an opium dream, and it is black humor that we find here, not just the usual belly-laughs.
So the members of Weird Al’s band play really well, which adds to the humor, Weird Al does a great job with the vocals, not hamming it up too much, and the lyrics and the musical devices are all funny.
Weird Al destroys George Harrison’s “I’ve got my mind set on you” with “This song’s just six words long!” As always, the words are funny, and it certainly is laughing at itself, but it’s also laughing at the George Harrison song, which is a potboiler of the worst sort with practically no inspiration in it. Harrison wrote a far superior song for an album of the so-call Contractual Obligation Album variety: “Only a Northern Song” for Lou Grade, whom the Beatles heartily despised.
“Living with a Hernia” is a parody of a popular song of the eighties whose name eludes me, but it is also a parody of aging rockers from James Brown to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
I try to imagine what it must be like to be around when Weird Al hears a new song, and sees the possibilities in it. Does he roll on the floor laughing the second it comes on, or does it take a while? There are more than a hundred spoofs of songs from all genres from his pen. (Considering some of the songs we hear over the airwaves, I'm not surprised.)
One of the most interesting songs from him is not a spoof at all, really, but a descendant of the sort of funny song Frank Zappa used to do. I wasn't surprised to learn that Dweezil Zappa was playing lead guitar on the track: it is “I'm a genius in France!” Some of the references escape me, but musically it is fascinating.
[Added later:
Weird Al has also made a couple of movies, a really good example being (OK, this is the only one I've seen) UHF. That's its name. It is a spoof of practically anything you ever saw, beginning with Indiana Jones. Having see that, I think Yankovic should be given a chance at a main-stream comedy as a director, or at least a script-writer. He does see the potential for parody ---which is, in my humble opinion, a major force in present-day comedy, if not the majorest force--- at the exclusion of other potentials, which [parody] probably strikes some critics as a derivative art-form. They say the Pun is the puniest form of wit, but good parody is brilliant. Mel Brooks did parody, and practically nothing but parody, and in my opinion he was one of the major creative forces in 20th-century cinema, and continues to be respected today. Al Yankovic could be that great, if things came together for him. It all depends on whether he stays focused on minutae (which can be pretty funny), or the humor in the big picture (which can also sometimes be funny, but has a bigger canvas, and more potential for greatness).]
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