Weird Al Yankovic, Nearly Four Decades On, Is Comedy Music's Unlikely Legacy Act

Alfred "Weird Al" Yankovic left his last conventional job in 1983. His self-titled debut album was already in stores, but he was still earning minimum wage at the radio network Westwood One, where his chores included daily trips to the post office. One day he pulled a copy of Billboard from the mailbag and found his song "Ricky," a parody of Toni Basil's "Mickey" built around "I Love Lucy," on the chart.

The single peaked at No. 63 on the Hot 100, but Yankovic took the placement as a signal. He says he gave notice that same day, figuring he might as well try being Weird Al full time. Asked when that began to feel like a viable career, Yankovic, who has just turned 63, joked that it was about three months ago.

The joke undersells his record. Yankovic is the most successful comedy recording artist ever, with more than 12 million albums sold. His most recent album, "Mandatory Fun," was the first comedy album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and the first to top that chart since Allan Sherman's "My Son, the Nut" in 1963. It earned him a fourth Grammy in 2015; he now has five. He has not put out a full-length album since, a gap he acknowledges is ironic. "It's kind of a nice mic drop," he says, though he insists it was not planned.

He says he has been recording less partly because hit-song parody is harder than it used to be. MTV arrived the same year as his first EP, and for years it determined who was famous, giving him a clear target in synth-pop, metal, hip-hop and grunge. In an era of micro-niches, he says, big stars and hits still exist but are harder to identify than they were a few years ago.

Yankovic has also outlasted the warning he absorbed early on, that novelty artists are typically one-hit wonders. That fear, he says, made him prolific in the 1980s. He has since recorded dozens of hits and outlived the cultural relevance of many artists he spoofed, including Greg Kihn, El DeBarge, Crash Test Dummies, Taylor Hicks and Iggy Azalea.

Admirers say his influence runs deep. Comedian Tim Heidecker, who grew up a devoted fan and later cast Yankovic as the creepy host Uncle Muscles on "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!," says people often dismiss childhood heroes before realizing how important they were. Will Menaker of the podcast "Chapo Trap House" traces the seed of that show to repeated viewings of Yankovic's 1989 film "UHF." Actor Evan Rachel Wood, who plays a fictionalized Madonna in the new biopic, says Yankovic stays family-friendly while still feeling like he is pushing the envelope. Barry Hansen, the DJ known as Dr. Demento, who first played Yankovic on the radio in March 1976, credits "inspiration and perspiration."

His current tour, billed as the Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, is a seated show drawn almost entirely from his original songs rather than his parodies. It began in April after COVID-related delays and ends Saturday at Carnegie Hall in New York. At a mid-September stop at the Santa Clarita Performing Arts Center, the set ran two hours, with opener Emo Philips, a few parodies such as "Amish Paradise" and a singalong "Yoda" near the end, and a crowd mostly made up of adult men in novelty shirts.

Yankovic's other main project is "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story," a counterfactual send-up of prestige biopics that premieres on the Roku Channel on Nov. 4. It grew from a 2010 fake trailer made with director Eric Appel. Yankovic had hesitated to expand it, noting that spoof biopics such as "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Walk Hard" did not do well at the box office, and that "UHF" had bombed. But a wave of real rock biopics, including "Bohemian Rhapsody," convinced him the genre was ripe for parody. Appel says the approach mirrors Yankovic's songs: treat the material as a dramatic biopic, but change the words.