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
People never ask people doing serious music, 'Do you ever think about doing funny music?'
I'll be mellow when I'm dead.
I know I'm a million times as humble as thou art!
There's a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody. There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea. Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don't work creatively for me.
There's enough people that do unfunny music. I'll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.
There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.
So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
Sometimes I get, "Have you ever thought about doing real music?" I like to think the music I do is real, it just happens to be funny.
My personal taste doesn't enter into it a lot when I make my decisions as to what to parody.
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.
I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
I try not to go the obvious route all the time, but sometimes the most obvious is actually the best.
One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don't realize there's a lot of craft behind the comedy.
If money can't buy happiness, then I guess I'll have to rent it.