Weird al headline news gif movie#

The secret of Weird Al’s success is that he may have been the first star of the YouTube/TikTok era - 30 years ahead of the invention of those things. The joke was on the original artists, and on us. The Weird Al version of a song might be about riding the bus, making a sandwich, or loving Rocky Road ice cream, but the song sounded nearly as catchy that way. By stripping the original lyrics away but preserving the hookiness of the music, Weird Al (with apologies to music critics) revealed something essential about how pop music works - that the lyrics to more pop songs than most would admit are basically window dressing. That the songs, in their silly new palm-buzzer versions, became hits all over again was the joke behind the joke.

He was taking famous paintings and drawing mustaches on them, mocking them with the everything’s-a-sham-including-me broad brush of Mad magazine crossed with the exuberance of a second-grader singing “Jingle bells, Batman smells.” He took pop songs and gave them noogies. The Weird Al songs were called parodies, yet to use that word is almost to elevate what he did. Starting in the early ’80s, he was a geek who attached himself to famous Top 40 singles and, by re-creating the songs but substituting the most dunderheaded lyrics possible, made those songs seem reborn as resplendent dumb imitations of themselves. The movie, to its credit, salutes, skewers, and completely understands the not just silly but goofball scandalous nature of the celebrity of “Weird Al” Yankovic. Which turns out to be a pleasingly ticklish sensation. “Weird,” in outfitting Weird Al’s mock artistry with a mock biopic, takes rib-nudging to the third power.

Part of the joke of Weird Al was that his song comedy had a knowingly over-obvious rib-nudging quality. It’s enthralled with pop culture and in love with the tropes it’s parodying - it makes fun of itself with such gleeful devotion that there’s something delirious yet sincere about its japery.

Weird al headline news gif movie#

Yet the movie has the spirit of one of the “Naked Gun” films. It’s all relentlessly over-the-top and exaggerated - the Weird Al aga turned into a circus-balloon version of itself. Almost nothing in the movie actually happened, save for the song parodies. It’s a movie that does to the biopic form what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” - imitates it, razzes it, throws mud at it, turns it inside out. “Weird,” it turns out, isn’t a real biopic.