"Weird Al" Yankovic/YMMV

• Acceptable Targets:
  • "Fat"
  • "Canadian Idiot"
  • "White & Nerdy"
  • "Amish Paradise", arguably. (He doesn't totally ridicule them, just some teasing.)
  • "She Never Told Me She Was A Mime".
  • "Party at the Leper Colony"
  • According to "Albuquerque," Bio-Dome.
• Awesome Music: While all his songs count, specifics go to the end of Hardware Store, all of White & Nerdy, and without a doubt, Skipper Dan!
  • Pick a Polka Medley. Any one. Chances are you'll have that song stuck in your head forever.
• Dork Age: Some fans felt that Al's appearance entered a Dork Age after he lost the glasses, grew out his hair, and shaved his mustache.
• Ear Worm: Everything he's ever made. But especially Trapped in the Drive Thru.

"Then we drive to the drive-thru
Heading off to the drive-thru
We're approaching the drive-thru
Getting close to the drive-thru!
Almost there at the drive-thru
Now we're here at the drive thru
Here in line at the drive-thru
Did I mention the drive-thru?"

• Epic Riff: "Eat It" has a riff that's so epic the guitar explodes.
• Face of the Band: Al has recorded with the same band (Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz, Jim West, and Steve Jay) for virtually his entire career, and they appear in all his videos. How many, outside of his dedicated fans, even know they exist (beyond saying "Hey, It's That Guy! from all of Weird Al's videos!")?
• Fan Dumb: his 2010^[1] Polka Medley, "Polka Face", shifted its focus away from more obscure songs for the first time. Cue people immediately accusing it of "being still relevant, dammit".
  • What? Weird Al's polka medleys have always had very relevant (if a year or two old at the time) songs.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: By a day. Al released "TMZ" on Alpocalypse on June 21, 2011, which contains the lyrics "... it's getting to the point where a famous person can't / Even get a DUI or go on a racist rant" and "Seems that every single time a star decides to / Shave their head or ram their car into a tree / They're on TMZ." The day before, Ryan Dunn of Jackass had killed himself by getting drunk and plowing into a tree at high speed. The story was, naturally, on TMZ.
  • The video for "TMZ" depicts a celebrity being plagued by photos of her own behind getting spread everywhere. Scarlett Johansson would go through this for real.
  • The opening line of "Traffic Jam", "Carbon monoxide making me choke", became far less amusing after Al's parents simultaneously succumbed to CO poisoning.
• Funny Moments: Most of his songs have at least one, but special mention is deserved for the "Smells Like Nirvana" music video. ALL OF IT.
  • Now has its own page.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The title of "Christmas at Ground Zero.
• Hate Dumb: Any of his videos (be it parodies or interviews) will attract angry comments from fans of the original artist, who are probably missing the fact that it's parodic...and that Al gets permission from the parody's target in the first place. On the other end, there's also the comments on his parodies and polkas that find great joy in how Al ripped the original songs a new one and proved to the world how much they suck.
• Heartwarming Moments: Now has its own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead", off his first album, contains the lyrics "I'd rather have a Big Mac or a Jumbo Jack than all the bean sprouts in Japan!" and "Don't want no part of that vegetarian scene." Al has since become a vegan.
  • He once wrote a song called "I Lost on Jeopardy". Later, he was on Wheel of Fortune during a round of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and won. He lost the following week, though. He also lost on Rock & Roll Jeopardy!.
  • "The Rye or the Kaiser" depicted the Champ taking ownership of the neighborhood deli...this was before Rocky Balboa, wherein he purchased a restaurant.
  • Also, in "It's All About the Pentiums", Al describes his personal computer as having a 40-inch-wide flatscreen monitor, 100 gigabytes of RAM, and a 32-bit operating system which is connected to the internet via a T1 line. While 40 inch monitors do exist, 32-bit x86 processors (Pentiums) cannot address more than 64 gigabytes of RAM, and no commercial 32-bit operating system as of 1999 permitted addressing more than 4. However, some versions of the 64-bit Windows 7 can address 192 gigabytes of RAM thus making the lyrics of his song a possibility. As of now, most commercial motherboards can only support between 32-64 gigabytes of RAM.
    • In the same song, Al says, "You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette." While small floppy diskettes can actually store up to over 200 megabytes of RAM, they were actually superceded through the years up from 1999 by data storage methods such as USB flash drives, which could now contain up to a terabyte of RAM; these drives were in their stages of infancy in 1999 at the time that the song was released, and did not go into the first commercial product until over a year later.
  • At one time in the music video for "White & Nerdy", one fictional Trivial Pursuit game asks a question on what page in the next (actually last) book Harry Potter would die (Harry gets better, though).
• Misattributed Song: Al's page on Wikipedia has an entire section devoted to the various parodies that he didn't do but are attributed to him, complete with a screen shot of Limewire.
• Moment of Awesome: Now has its own page.
• Nightmare Fuel: "Christmas at Ground Zero". The last lines say it all:

What a crazy fluke
We're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday.

• • Also, "The Night Santa Went Crazy" (though more the lyrics while not being sung).
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: TMZ. Like many of his other songs, it's a brilliant (if somewhat awkward, see above) parody with strong attention paid on the original. But when you really listen in on the lyrics, you'll realize that it's actually a serious commentary of our culture and how accepting we are of how shameful the paparazzi has become. It's really a Take That at what our popular culture has become and how little we've learned from the Princess Diana catastrophe. This is reinforced in the music video where the celebrity in question is running in the streets. Humiliated beyond words. Beyond comprehension. THAT alone says something.
• Special Effect Failure: Done deliberately in several videos (for example, during the second chorus in "Jurassic Park").
• Tastes Like Diabetes: "If That Isn't Love". Yes, it's supposed to be a spoof of these types of love songs, but one could argue that he spoofed them a little *too* well, and that the attempts at "twisted" humor fail to offset the cheesiness of the chorus. Not to mention that it's a style parody of Hanson, who are arguably an example of this trope.
• Tear Jerker: A rather more-than-usual subjective example is Skipper Dan. Once you focus on the lyrics, the song isn't exactly one of the happiest you can listen to. Lyrics aside however, the tune reminds of other, summer-ish, hopeful-sounding songs often heard in the late nineties.
  • From his Twitter page: Al on the death of Steve Jobs, (needless to say, itself a Tear Jerker) being astonishingly serious about it: "RIP Steve Jobs. Thanks for improving life as we know it."
    • Also: "Oh man. Can't believe it. RIP Michael Jackson."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Let's be honest, Osama bin Laden's death would have been a better subject for "Party in the CIA", despite the fact that Al no doubt wrote the song before it happened.
• Uncanny Valley: Weird Al's Perform This Way, as his face is digitally subbed over a female dancer. The effect is seriously creepy in a hilarious sort of way, which is certainly intentional, considering who he's parodying.
• What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Apparently Al is clean. Yet, somehow we have the mindfuck of "Everything You Know is Wrong" and the sheer garbled insanity of "Albuquerque."
  • Al's friend and UHF castmate Victoria Jackson once said in an interview that she thinks drugs would make Al act normal.

1. ↑ (debuted in his 2010 tour, and has become available to a wide audience in the 2011 album Alpocalypse)