June 1, 2013 Ranking Weird Al Yankovic
This is the first in a series of transplanted articles from my other blog. The transplants will run on Saturdays until they’re all over here. They are copied and pasted, but might get slight edits here and there.
Today I’m starting a series I’ve been mulling for a long time now: going through each of Weird Al’s albums and ranking the songs in the order I like them.
When I think about things that have been an influence on my appreciation for comedy, Weird Al Yankovic is in the top five. (Other influences: Bill Cosby, the Muppets, Steve Martin, and ComedySportz.) I don’t even remember when I first heard of him or who introduced me to his work (though I’m guessing it was either Eric or Josh), but I remember taking to him right away. Al parodies pop culture – music, mostly, but he tends to hit most areas – in ways that are both humorous and honoring. He might be making fun of TV, but you can tell he likes the stuff he’s poking fun at. He also parodies in what I would call a “gentle” way. He’s rarely mean towards his subjects, and he always asks permission of the artists before parodying their songs.
It’s funny to me that I have mostly experienced Weird Al/pop culture backwards from his intention. His songs generally rely on a person knowing either the song he’s rewritten or the topic to which he’s referring. Most of his music Is stuff I’ve heard before I’ve heard the originals he’s spoofing. In fact, there’ve been several things I’ve found out about through him that I’ve gone on to enjoy in their own right.
The art on this one kind of blows my mind.
So. His first album was released in 1983 and it was called “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.” I’ll list the songs in the order I like them, from least to most. Keep in mind that I still like most all of his songs, I just like some of them more.
12. Gotta Boogie – Ugh. One of my least favorite of all his songs. It’s a disco/booger joke that gets old quick. I dislike gross humor, and I dislike this song.
11. Such a Groovy Guy – I can appreciate the 70s-ishness of the main character of this song and appreciate the skewering of that sort of guy, but I dislike the character enough that it affects my enjoyment of the song.
10. The Check’s in the Mail – A song full of “business speak” that still holds up today, really. Add a couple of “proactive”s and “think outside the box”s and it would fit right in.
9. I’ll Be Mellow When I’m Dead – When I was younger I liked this song more. “Let’s go be crazy!” was a common thought I had as a teen. Now that I’m older, I’m more of a “Let’s chill out” kind of guy.
8. Buckingham Blues – The story of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, set to the blues. A great song, but too sad to enjoy anymore since we saw how that story ended.
7. I Love Rocky Road – Classic. Al sings a lot of food songs over the course of the next 30 years, as you’ll see. This one only suffers a little bit because it’s hard to match the key change in the middle parts when you’re singing along.
6. Another One Rides the Bus – This song may be why I don’t like riding public transportation of any sort.
5. Stop Draggin’ My Car Around – I’ve come to love the song this one’s a parody of, so this one’s gotten higher on the list over the years. When I hear the original, though, I sing the words to this one. That… actually happens a lot with most songs Al has covered.
4. Happy Birthday – Synopsis: go ahead and have a happy birthday even though terrible things are happening all over the world! Darkly hilarious.
3. Ricky – I Love Lucy in convenient catchy song form.
2. My Bologna – One of Al’s first big hits, and one of many that’s better than the original song. Also: another food song.
1. Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung – Another terribly dark song that has always amused me way more than it should. Poor Mr. Frump.
There are 12 more albums left to go. I’m curious to see if at the end of it I can put together my top ten favorite songs or put the albums in order. We shall see!
Tags: Weird Al
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May 31, 2013 Hey Hey Hey
I know it doesn’t seem like it all the time, but I do plan posts ahead many times. Sure, there are some “yikes, I better take a lunch break and get something written!” moments, but I often have an idea ahead of time, even if it isn’t written yet. And then there are times when I have ideas and am about to start writing when something else happens that makes me completely change my plans. Today is one of those times.
Last night, my wife bought us tickets to go see Bill Cosby in September.
Now, I’m a guy who tends to not get too excited about future things. I’ve seen too many plans change and things happen, so I’ve found it’s best to not get my hopes up until the thing I was looking forward to is actually happening. That might seem goofy to you, but it works out pretty well for me most of the time. [Side note: this is actually part of the reason I ended up seeing The Avengers twice on opening day. I had taken the day off work for my birthday and was planning to go see it that night with my wife, but she was all “well, let’s plan on it, but we’ll have to see how things go” and I’ve had that mean “we’re not going” enough that I decided to go to a noon showing just to be sure. But then she did end up being able to go, so I went again and didn’t even mind a little bit.]
But seeing Bill Cosby? The tickets have barely been printed and it’s four months out and I’m already giddy about it. There is a short list of entertainers that I want to see live and an even shorter list of entertainers that I’ve wanted to see live as far back as I can remember – really, there’s only one name on that list and it’s Bill Cosby. He’s actually been here in my home town a couple of times but it hasn’t worked out for me to go see him, so this is particularly exciting for me.
I don’t know how our family came to have a copy of To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With, but I do know I wore that thing out [Side note for the younger folk in the audience: this was back when things were on cassette tape and you could literally wear albums out] memorizing it. My brother (not named Russell) and I would quote bits to each other, and to this day there’s an occasional reference still. I’d guess it was the popularity of this album in the family that led to us watching The Cosby Show together. We didn’t watch much TV as a family, so the five or six shows we did watch together were even more special than they might have been otherwise.
There’s just something special about The Cos, man. That tape was my first introduction to stand up comedy in any form, and I’ve since come to understand there’s no one quite like him. He wasn’t a joke teller, he was a storyteller, one with a way of telling those stories that no one even tried to match because it wouldn’t have made sense for them. All these years later, I can still remember his stories about Junior Barnes and Buck Buck and learning karate and giving his kids chocolate cake for breakfast, and it’s weird to me that I haven’t heard any of those stories in more than a decade – I mean, they seem so fresh in my memory that I must have just listened to them a few weeks ago, right?
I know now that his TV shows were groundbreaking, that his fame as a comic was initially unusual because of his race. I didn’t know any of that as a kid, all I knew is that I wanted to learn every word of all of his stories and tell them to other people, not so they would laugh at me, but so they could hear his stories and laugh with me at them. To this day, I still feel like I want to do that. I mean, I’ve learned that you don’t tell other people’s jokes and stories, of course, but I still want to be a storyteller like Bill Cosby is a storyteller. If you were to pin me down and force me to tell you my dreams, that would be at the top of the list.
Bill Cosby will turn 76 in July of this year. He’s still touring, still telling stories! There are days when I can barely make the drive to work, and I can’t even imagine what I’ll be like in 35 years, and I can’t help but be awed, shamed, and a little inspired by Mr. Cosby. I can’t wait to see him in person.
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Here’s the first part of that album, and if you follow the links after it, the rest of it’s there, too. Really, though, you should do what I did last night and get the album from Amazon.
Tags: Cosby
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May 30, 2013 Wonderfalls S01E10: Lying Pig
SUMMARY
Starting immediately after the last episode ended, Eric starts to feel woozy and leaves Jaye and Heidi to argue. During the argument, the Mounted Fish tells Jaye to “mend what is broken”, which upsets her. The next morning, she calls Aaron and asks him to come over. She tells him all about the muses. His solution is to collect them all and remove them from the places she frequents. After seeing a new muse on a television commercial, she tosses the TV out the window and accidentally hits Heidi in the head.
Jaye and Eric meet up at the hospital. Heidi has suffered a mild concussion, and also thinks they are still on their honeymoon. The three of them go back to the honeymoon suite that Heidi rebooked, and Eric leaves to go to the Barrel. When the same bellboy that Heidi cheated with shows up, Jaye realizes that Heidi is just pretending to have amnesia. She threatens to go tell Eric, but decides not to. Heidi comes into the Barrel and tells him herself. She asks him to marry her again, and after looking at Jaye and getting no response, he agrees.
Jaye admits to Mahandra that she thinks she’s in love with Eric, and Mahandra insists that she tell Eric. She attempts to go to the chapel and tell Eric herself, but is thwarted by a muse under the brake pedal. Jaye is also on her way to the chapel in a taxi, and arrives just before the ceremony starts. Eric tells Jaye that he’s glad that he is giving his marriage another chance, because it was tearing him apart. Jaye agrees to stay and be a witness to their vows.
The muses get a lot of mileage out of the phrase “mend what’s broken” in this episode. And once again, it relates to more than just our main plot. Jaye resigns herself to trying to halfheartedly reunite Heidi and Eric, mostly by keeping her feelings for Eric to herself. She tries several times to tell him how she feels, but each time is silenced by a muse. She also helps her parents’ relationship, as Karen obviously feels like she is being ignored by her husband. The subplot with Dr. Chambers was pretty funny, especially with Sharon in on the sneaky shenanigans.
“You do realize this is all going on your credit card?”
While I like the pairing of Mahandra and Aaron, I felt that Mahandra’s babbling and weird defensiveness was a little much. So far, Mahandra has been more of the voice of reason, although she sometimes gets caught up in things and loses control (Pink Flamingos, Barrel Bear). Her getting all stammery over references to brothers and other triggers seemed over the top. It was supposed to be comedic, but it just felt forced to me.
And finally someone is really in on the secret of the muses with Jaye. Aaron’s reaction when Jaye told him was hard to read. Was he disbelieving, or was this confirming something he had already suspected? He seems truly interested in the mystery though, and doesn’t immediately call Jaye crazy, which is a far cry from his suggestion that she be euthanized in the pilot episode.
We get to see a lot of muses in this episode. The Mounted Bass begins by saying this episode’s refrain: “mend what is broken”. The Wax Lion later repeats it in Jaye’s trailer, followed by the Lying Pig on a bacon package on a television commercial, and then the cobra on Eric’s tee shirt. T-Shirt Cobra also says for Jaye to spit out her gum, which influences her parents’ subplot, and that it’s Heidi’s “check out time” from the hospital. Later, at the Barrel, the Mounted Bass tells Jaye to “Uhhh – shut it!” when she starts to tell Eric the truth about Heidi’s amnesia and then to “get to the church on time”. And of course, we see a couple scenes with a whole bunch of them, first in Jaye’s trailer, then again in Aaron’s bedroom, as he tries to get them to communicate with him.
TRIVIA & REFERENCES:
- Jaye mentions Days of Our Lives when she realizes that Heidi has been faking her amnesia. This is a long-running soap opera.
- After Darrin punches Dr. Chambers, Jaye comments that it is like Tyson v. Holyfield, which is the incident in which boxer Mike Tyson bit off the ear of his opponent, Evander Holyfield.
Tags: LWST, Wonderfalls
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May 29, 2013 Phil Hartman
Gravitas and wackiness all in one Phil Hartman-sized package
Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of Phil Hartman‘s untimely death. My inclination was to do a Tuesday 10 in honor of his memory, but the list was too strange. Sure he was in Jingle All the Way, Small Soldiers, and ¡Three Amigos!, but those aren’t the things you remember him for. You remember him from such shows as Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, and NewsRadio, and probably in that order. I couldn’t get past those three and make any sense of an order for the remaining stuff, no matter how much of an irrational love I have for the movie Coneheads.
I’ve never been much of a Saturday Night Live guy. I mean, sure, I enjoy the famous skits, but those are the ones that bubble up and get famous for a reason – I let the Internet tell me which ones are worth my time. I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones here and there, but I’m well-enough-versed to keep up my end of the conversation in an SNL discussion. Somewhere in the midst of that I picked up on how important he was to SNL the years he was there, a combination of glue and father figure with a sense of comedy few had. He wasn’t afraid to take risks and he was often the only reason material worked.
His characters on The Simpsons (most notably Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure) are some of the best, and it’s easy to tell even if you didn’t know that Zapp Brannigan on Futurama was a a role created specifically for him. NewsRadio was a perfect fit for him (even though it most likely contributed to his murder), and the season after he was gone is a good indication of just how much he brought to the table.
Whenever I happen to think about Phil Hartman, I can’t help but think of two other performers: Jim Henson and Steve Martin. Like Jim Henson, Phil was taken too soon and we were robbed of so much more enjoyment they would have provided. Like Steve Martin, Phil was a man of many talents, and I can’t help but wonder what else he might’ve gotten around to later in life.
Gone too soon.
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- Posted under Movies, TV