comedy

"Weird Al" Yankovic

1 festival played →

Five decades of the sharpest parody in pop — accordion, costume changes, and songs that outlive what they spoof.

"Weird Al" Yankovic is an American musician and satirist from Downey, California, who began sending accordion-and-tape-recorder parodies to Dr. Demento's radio show in the late 1970s. His first releases, among them "My Bologna" and "Another One Rides the Bus", set the pattern: note-for-note recreations of hit records with rewritten lyrics, usually about food, television, or suburban tedium.

Alongside parodies such as "Eat It", "Like a Surgeon", "Smells Like Nirvana", "Amish Paradise" and "White & Nerdy", he writes original songs in the style of particular artists, and closes out albums with accordion-driven polka medleys of current hits. He has worked with essentially the same backing band since the early 1980s, directs many of his own videos, and has also directed clips for other artists including Ben Folds, Hanson and the Presidents of the United States of America.

He has sold more than twelve million albums, recorded upward of 150 parody and original songs, and performed over 2,000 live shows, earning five Grammy Awards, four gold records and six platinum records along the way. Straight Outta Lynwood and its single "White & Nerdy" gave him his first top-ten album and single in 2006, nearly three decades into his career, and Mandatory Fun in 2014 became his first number-one album; he has released only singles since.

He starred in the 1989 film UHF, wrote and hosted The Weird Al Show in 1997, and has produced two satirical accounts of his own life, The Compleat Al in 1985 and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story in 2022. He has also written two children's books. Live, the show leans on costume changes and video interludes between songs.

Read more

comedy