![]() While I was struggling to precisely articulate the cultural necessity of Yankovic’s oddball genius, an artist friend happened to send me a quote from Mike Kelley that Dodie Bellamy borrowed for the epigraph to her 2015 book, When the Sick Rule the World: “What I dislike about a lot of contemporary artists,” Kelley said, “is that they want to be hipsters. Well, sometimes in my dreams I can still hear the screams So I took her to the homecoming dance Then I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair Demento.) Example: a James Taylor–esque ditty titled “Good Old Days,” in which Yankovic sings as a psychopath nostalgic for his youth: Do you remember sweet Michelle? (Imagine if Dennis Cooper had grown up taking accordion lessons and revering Dr. It is kind of important when people are no longer able to rebel or to change what happens or, to use a bad word, influence politics or history, they begin to make satires.*Ĭool kids always manage to end up in the pocket of authority-bad boys become good old boys, one way or another.Īlthough “Weird Al” Yankovic’s spoofs have been gracing the airwaves since the Ford administration, for the two hours of his sublime “The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour,” he sang not his beloved parodies but his originals-lesser-known genre send-ups that are sometimes surprisingly twisted and ferocious. (Let the rise of Joe Rogan be citation enough here.) To borrow a one-liner from Morgan Bassichis’s brilliant solo performance Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue), “What stage of capitalism is it called when everyone’s a comedian?” In a 1982 interview with the French filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub-who might be most expediently contextualized here as not comedians-Straub notes: During the whole Nazi time in Germany, they had a lot of satire. ![]() In the cultural devolution of “audience” to “eyeballs,” perhaps no genre has so loudly insisted on its robust resistance to power as comedy-and perhaps no genre’s complicity has, since 2017, been made more transparent. Photo: Daniel Knighton/Getty Images.ĬAN AN ARTIST HIT THE JUGULAR while they’re reaching for the wallet at the same time? Only if the wallet and the jugular are the same thing. “Weird Al” Yankovic performing at Pechanga Casino, Temecula, CA, September 16, 2022. ![]()
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