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I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.
While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.
However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.
Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.
This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.
Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.
There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.
While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.
I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.
Weird Al is a master of parody (e.g. "Like a Surgeon," a parody of Madonna's "Like a Virgin"), but where he really shows off his talent is in his "non-parody" songs, because they fall into a related category: pastiche. Where a parody takes an original work and exchanges some of the words, keeping much of the structure but telling a different story, pastiche takes as its baseline another artist's style, and builds the rest of the variant work from the ground up. Done well, the pastiche sounds like a lost work of the original artist, but (often, in Weird Al's case) with a comic twist (e.g. "Mission Statement," an excellent send-up of Crosby, Stills, and Nash's body of work).
Parody is simple enough, assuming you're sufficiently clever with words, but pastiche--especially pastiche across many musical subgenres--is what marks out Weird Al as a generational musical talent. It doesn't hurt that he's much beloved by his fans as a genuinely sweet and humble person.
So the current tour has stuff like "Velvet Elvis" and "Dog Eat Dog"?
I noticed years ago that a lot of his non-parody songs ended up as "random stream of conciousness" lyrics. It felt like the constraints of parody forced him to work harder, with better results.
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