Guest Star Highlight: “Weird” Al Yankovic!
By Bill Reick
Full disclosure here, folks. Tonight, I’m driving up to Harlem with my girlfriend and my mom. We’re making a pilgrimage to the legendary Apollo Theater to see “Weird” Al Yankovic.
“Little ditty, ’bout Homer and Marge.” – “Weird” Al Yankovic
“Weird” Al is sacred to me. Sure, he’s just a man, but he sorta represents more than that. He convinced me that it’s okay to be weird. And even more than that, he taught me that sometimes, being weird makes you exceptional.
There’s a reason why Al’s career has outlasted the careers of the artists he’s parodied. He is timeless. His is a pure comedy. “Weird” Al is unmarred by shock, by trend, or by controversy. He is almost pointedly inoffensive. Al’s is a truer, more undeniable comedy that can wash away anybody’s troubles.
In the same way that The Simpsons knows what we want, so does Al. Both of these institutions know that we want to be free of our day-to-day burdens. We want to sit back and laugh. And both The Simpsons and Mr. Yankovic deliver. In laughter, we don’t just forget our troubles. We reject them altogether. How dare we laugh when doom is ever-nearing? I don’t know, but get a load of what Weird Al can do with that goddamn accordion.
“Weird” Al Yankovic appears in the season 14 episode “Three Gays of the Condor.”