'Weird Al' Yankovic
For years, Weird Al Yankovic was dismissed as a novelty musician\u2014here today, gone tomorrow\u2014but it\u2019s been 40 years, and his weird and wonderful career shows no signs of slowing down. \u201cPeople often think that if something is funny, it has lesser value and doesn\u2019t deserve respect. Obviously, not me. I embrace it, and I encourage the people I work with to let their freak flag fly.\u201dAl developed his \u201cfreak flag\u201d pretty early on. \u201cI was always a little outside the norm. Even in elementary school when everyone was playing together at recess, I would act out some TV show in my mind. I must have looked like a crazy kid, off by myself doing all these characters. It didn\u2019t make me very popular.\u201d An only child, Al did not make friends easily and had a hard time finding his crowd\u2014a situation which was exacerbated by being two years younger than his classmates. But he was so smart and, well, nerdy, he skipped a few grades.Al found solace by listening to the radio, particularly Southern California DJ Dr. Demento, who brought unique, funny novelty music to the masses every Sunday night. Al already had a unique talent\u2014he played the accordion. So, he tried his hand at making his own musical parodies, and one of them, a parody of The Knack\u2019s \u201cMy Sharona\u201d called \u201cMy Bologna,\u201d made it onto Dr. Demento\u2019s radio show and quickly became the number one song on the program.With wind in his sails, Al moved to Los Angeles to see if he could make it as a comedic musician, and the rest is history. After 40 years of success, he\u2019s outlasted many of the artists that he\u2019s parodied over the years, and as each new generation of twelve-year-olds rediscover Weird Al, his legend grows. \u201cI\u2019m kind of a novelty dinosaur at this point, but maybe society can only handle one Weird Al at a time.\u201dAl joins\xa0Off Camera\xa0to talk about why MTV was such a catalyst for his career, how he once gave Madonna a business lesson, why parents of only children should not be given binoculars, and just how white and nerdy he really is.