"Weird Al" Yankovic

“Weird Al” Yankovic may be considered our most successful (and only) pop-music parodist, but his true greatness lies in his unwavering sense of the absurd. It does not require comic genius to replace the word “Beat” with “Eat” and then climb into a fat suit to sing “Eat It.” But it does take a discerningly quirky mind to come up with song entitled “Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters From a Planet Near Mars” (from the original soundtrack for the movie UHF) or “Harvey the Wonder Hamster” (theme song for his, um, pet hamster and best friend, who would often meet an untimely end on various Weird Al TV shows) or his little-heard parody of “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev. Yet, Weird Al will be forever synonymous with the long-gone “MTV era,” when watching music videos for hours on cable TV seemed exciting, and when Yankovic single-handedly punctured the music channel’s array of overinflated egos. But nostalgia hasn’t kept him from following his muse. After you’ve parodied every major artist, every pop-music genre, and nearly every pop-culture foible, what’s left? Yourself. Go to funnyordie.com and check out the trailer for his never-coming-to-a-theater-near-you biopic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—it’s a three-minute mini-epic that collects every music- and movie-industry cliche and then transposes them into the Weird Al mythos. It’s pretty damn funny—and it even includes “Eat It.” So who needs MTV? Not Al. (Coury Turczyn)