Review: The lesson of ‘Weird Al' Yankovic: We'll miss him when he's gone

Chicago Tribune

30-06-2025

As joyful and virtuosic and oddly as 'Weird Al' Yankovic's two-hour whirligig was on Sunday night at Ravinia Festival, I couldn't help watch without sadness: Here is the last of the great parody kings, the closing chapter, and the pinnacle, of a delightfully ridiculous tradition. Social media is not lacking in joke songs; the novelty artist today seems closer to routine than, well, novelty. And yet the world is too driven by algorithms, too fragmented in its tastes, to ever be on the same page again and get the same jokes.
Will there ever be another 'Weird Al'?
Even if we come across someone on TikToK or Instagram who shows a strand of that old 'Weird Al' DNA — the pillow-soft yucks, the devotion to honoring the spirit of the artist being spoofed, the open-hearted stupidity for stupidity's sake, the craftsmanship — can they get across the rigor involved in being this gloriously dumb without losing the laugh? Will they understand the funniest thing about 'Weird Al' has always been the insane amount of talent that goes into perfecting something so fundamentally idiotic?
Particularly live, fronted by an eight-piece band that cuts seamlessly from the sleek corporate mellowness of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to the grind of Nirvana to a spot-on Backstreet Boy glide, changing costumes each song, it's the best joke he's got.
It's just hard to see a future for this tradition.
Not because of a lack of skill, but how eroded common ground has become. Looking back, it's no surprise 'Weird Al' was necessary in the early 1980s, at a moment when Mad magazine no longer generated the same and Top 40 music was driven by legitimately iconic, ultra-ubiquitous images from overplayed music videos. 'Weird Al' wore the red leather Michael Jackson jacket for 'Eat It,' his 'Beat It' parody, and even if he never played the song, we'd get the joke. For 'Smells Like Nirvana,' he wore the forest green sweater that Kurt Cobain wore in his videos. The encore was a rousing embrace of 'Star Wars,' with Stormtroopers crowding the stage, a ballpark-organ cover of 'The Imperial March,' and 'Weird Al,' eyes tight, dramatically conflating Yoda and The Kinks:
'Weird Al,' at 65, with the same string-fry hair and Hawaiian shirts as the past five decades, hit a high point early with a delirious polka of contemporary hits, from Billie Eillish and Taylor Swift to Cardi B and Olivia Rodrigo, playfully sanitized for kids in the house — But 'Weird Al' is really a creature of the monoculture, the days when your grandparents and your 8-year-old neighbor had the same cultural references, when there were three TV networks, radio played the same Top 40 songs endlessly and everyone turned out for the same movies.
Which means a 'Weird Al' concert does double duty as a kind of walk through the past 50 or so years of pop culture, squashing Spider-Man against 'Piano Man,' Flintstones against Red Hot Chili Peppers — think kaleidoscopic jukebox musical, but flexible, broad for long swaths then, turning on a dime, hilariously specific. A song about Disney's Jungle Cruise ride nodded to generations of slumming actors playing river guides, while secretly dreaming they were in 'Speed-the-Plow.' A CSNY parody showed how unnervingly easy it is to swap out the back-to-nature authenticity of '70s singer-songwriters with corporate speak: He even covered Helen Reddy's 'I Am Woman,' just because, as sincerely as possible.
It's our cultural currency — as is 'Weird Al' himself, even more than many of the acts he's parodied. While the band changed outfits, we got video montages reminding us just how much 'Weird Al' is part of that currency, namechecked on 'The Simpsons,' '30 Rock,' 'Scooby Doo,' and on and on. You get the sense 'Weird Al' is not bragging with these videos, but honored to find himself, decades later, a human cartoon, swallowed whole by culture, as if tossed into a B-movie sci-fi vat. The show began with a liturgy of business nonsense — — and concluded with the band singing a remarkable extended mashup of nonsense lyrics, from the 'Grim Grinning Ghosts' song at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion to
Somehow, it made perfect sense.