Singer, rock parodist, accordionist

"Weird Al" Yankovic's method is simple: Take the title of a popular song, change it slightly to make it sound ridiculous, write funny lyrics to go with the new title, and make an equally funny video to go with the resulting song. Yankovic has used these means for over a decade to establish himself as pop music's premier parodist.

Yankovic told Lynn Van Matre of the Chicago Tribune that the "warped outlook" that characterizes his work is the result of the accordion lessons he took as a child; it was the accordion that helped Yankovic take his first step toward stardom. In 1979 Yankovic was an architecture student who also worked at his college radio station. At the station one day, he took his accordion into the men's room and recorded "My Bologna," a parody of the flash-in-the-pan pop group the Knack's "My Sharona." He sent the song to Dr. Demento, host of a nationally syndicated radio show featuring offbeat, obscure, and humorous recordings. "My Bologna" was a hit with Dr. Demento's nutty audience, and Capitol Records offered Yankovic a contract to issue the song as a single. He followed it with a parody of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" entitled "Another One Rides the Bus," which became the most requested song in the first decade of Dr. Demento's show and led to a recording contract with Rock 'n' Roll Records.

Yankovic's first album, Weird Al Yankovic, was released in 1983 and featured a mix of his Dr. Demento hits and new parodies. One of the new songs was "Ricky," which put lyrics about Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, of the long-running 1950s television series I Love Lucy, to the tune of Toni Basil's hit pop tune "Mickey." The result was a single that made Billboard's Top 100 and a video that gave Yankovic his first exposure on cable network MTV. He was quoted by Gary Graff of the Detroit Free Press as saying, "Ricky Ricardo has always been one of my major role models. I always wanted to grow up to be a Puerto Rican band leader."

Rode Michael Jackson's Coattails

But Yankovic has come to be associated more with superstar Michael Jackson than with Ricky Ricardo. Yankovic's biggest hit came in 1984 when "Eat It," his parody of Jackson's "Beat It," made the Top 20. The video of the song was also hugely popular, imitating the sets and dance routines of Jackson's video, but making food the subject matter. In 1988 Yankovic did another send-up of Jackson, entitling his album Even Worse in response to Jackson's album Bad, and parodying the title song from Jackson's album with the single and video "Fat." In the video Yankovic wore prosthetic makeup that took three hours to put on and transformed him into a grotesquely overweight facsimile of Jackson, complete with black leather, jheri curls, and buckles aplenty. Of course, in order to make these parodies, Yankovic had to obtain Jackson's permission to use the melodies of his hit songs. Yankovic told the Chicago Tribune's Van Matre that Jackson "has a good sense of humor. He really seems to appreciate the things I do."

Evidently plenty of other songwriters and performers have had a sense of humor over the years as well. Yankovic has written parody lyrics and made videos of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" ("Like a Surgeon"), the Police's "King of Pain" ("King of Suede"), Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" ("Girls Just Want to Have Lunch"), and Greg Kihn's "Jeopardy" ("I Lost on Jeopardy"), among others. The popularity of his videos afforded "Weird Al" the opportunity to branch out a bit, which led to a 1985 television special on the cable service Showtime entitled Weird Al Yankovic: The Compleat Al. In 1988 he hosted a semi-regular show on MTV called "Al TV," which featured his favorite music videos along with sales pitches for "Weird Al" paraphernalia.

Lampooned American Popular Culture

Performing parodies has brought Yankovic success, but his considerable abilities go beyond writing new lyrics to other people's tunes. His albums have always included original compositions that feature satirical lyrics about some of the tackier aspects of American life. "Mr. Popeil," "I'm Stuck in the Closet with Vanna White," and "Velvet Elvis" have all poked fun at staples of American popular culture; the title track of his 1985 album, Dare to Be Stupid, reflected clueless Americans in general. Describing both his parodies and original songs, Yankovic told Van Matre, "Most of my songs are about food or television or other important aspects of the American pop culture." Once, when asked if he had considered giving up his spoofs to concentrate on performing original songs, Yankovic told the Detroit Free Press's Graff, "I think there'd be a big public backlash if I did. The public is used to me doing parodies. When we do an original, they'll come up and say, 'That's great, Al, but what's it a parody of?'"

Brought Trademark Weirdness to UHF

His reputation as a parodist enabled Yankovic to expand his range with the 1989 feature film UHF, a parody of television that he co-wrote and starred in. Yankovic played a man who inherits a television station with chronically low ratings and transforms it by replacing reruns of old sitcoms with game shows like Wheel of Fish and Name That Stain. Describing the movie to Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, Yankovic called it "a cross between [the Frank Capra classic] It's a Wonderful Life, [Prince's movie] Purple Rain, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

In both his original compositions and his parodies, on video and in the movies, Yankovic has been constant in poking fun at familiar aspects of popular culture in America. Yankovic told Graff that his continued success with this brand of humor has run contrary to conventional wisdom: "Just doing the kind of material I do, people tag me as a one-hit wonder, a novelty artist." A decade of success, though, has demonstrated Yankovic's unique ability to consistently use to his greatest advantage the popular culture he so hilariously lampoons.

—Lloyd Hemingway