Al Yankovic
Al Yankovic
Alfred Matthew "Weird Al" Yankovic is an American singer, songwriter, parodist, record producer, satirist, actor, voice actor, music video director, film producer, and author. He is known for his humorous songs that make light of popular culture and often parody specific songs by contemporary musical acts, original songs that are style pastiches of the work of other acts, and polka medleys of several popular songs, featuring his favored instrument, the accordion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth23 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
It fit pretty nicely into my schedule because we'd pretty much finished the bulk of promotion for Mandatory Fun and were just getting geared up for the World Tour so this was a nice time for me to be working on it.
Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.
You fake something until you're good at it.
I've done a movie and a TV series, and someday I'd like to do a successful movie and a successful TV series. That would be nice.
That's something the kids should know about. Reading is a gateway to witchcraft and lesbianism.
I do a lot of different things, sometimes at the same time, and it's very difficult to figure out where I fit.
The irony is of course that my career has lasted a whole lot longer than some of the people I've parodied over the years.
So I'm one of the few celebrities that got to do a repeat performance on 'The Simpsons,' which I'm very flattered by.
Pop culture's gotten much more disposable.
My hobbies just sort of gradually became my vocation.
It was difficult to get into my friends' rock bands when I was a teenager. They somehow didn't see the need for an accordion player. That's when I realized that I had to find my own path in life.
In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
My personal taste doesn't enter into it a lot when I make my decisions as to what to parody.