Fridge Brilliance: Weird Al generally doesn't take cheap shots, so it's sort of unfitting when he makes not one, but two borderline homophobic jokes in the same song: Couch Potato. Recall the original artist of that tune.
"Perform This Way" is a Lady Gaga parody, and at one point, Al is seen wearing a peacock costume. Peacocks are known to flaunt their weird colorful tail feathers in order to gain attention and show off. Lady Gaga does exactly that, except she doesn't have feathers. Usually.
Even better, during the Alpocalypse tour he performed "Perform This Way" in said peacock costume.
"Wanna B Ur Lovr" from the Poodle Hat album is an Intercourse with You song consisting entirely of cheesy, off-the-wall pickup lines that would never work on anyone in real life... EXCEPT other fans who had heard the song. Anyone who understood the context would love it, thus subverting its original intent as a parody of such songs, making it the perfect Intercourse with You song for Weird Al fans.
"Everything You Know Is Wrong":
The narrator is abducted by aliens who later offer to transport him back to any point in history that he would care to go, so he chooses "last Thursday night so [he] could pay [his] phone bill on time". Why would he choose something that mundane when he could choose any point in history? Well, the aliens never said they'd return him to his own time afterwards, so he'd risk being stuck in some lousy time period for the rest of his life. He was completely unprepared for the time travel, so he couldn't, for instance, travel back one week and bring some lottery numbers with him. Reliving many years of his life might also be really boring and wouldn't be worth it unless he wanted to try to prevent some terrible incident.
Why does the narrator react so casually to things like driving blindfolded with a rabid wolverine in the car, aliens from an alternate dimension removing his internal organs, and even his own death? As he says in the chorus, in his world, everything that seems important doesn't really matter.
In "Wanna B Ur Lovr", Al sings, "My lips are registered weapons. Can I invade your personal space?". That line might not make sense at first, but if you think about it, it actually does make sense: he's asking someone to kiss him.
In "Jackson Park Express", the narrator thinks the woman who got on the bus is the answer to everything and explains it's why he'll bomb the written part of his driver's test. That gives a perfectly good reason why he's taking the bus to work instead of driving.
"Foil":
The chemical symbol for aluminum is 'Al' and its stable isotope has an atomic mass of 27.
The music video addresses the Fridge Logic inherent in many conspiracy theories: if there's a powerful shadow organization that secretly controls the government, why doesn't it just kill that pesky Conspiracy Theorist who keeps exposing their schemes?note This is sometimes Hand Waved with "they don't want to create a martyr and draw more attention to them", which just opens more cans of Fridge Logic if the conspiracy theory involves the shadow organization hiring hitmen and arranging "accidents" for other people who had figured out the truth. In the music video, the conspiracy is real, and the conspirators do take out Al for exposing them!
In the music video for "I'll Sue Ya", all products are spelled out as Bland Name Products with different logos, even though Al clearly sings their real names in the song. Well, they can't use the original logos or names; they'd get sued.
In "Genius In France", Al mentions that he doesn't know how to dance among his other flaws...which makes him more of a loser than Jimmy the Geek from "That Boy Could Dance".
May cross over to Fridge Horror territory but....there's a reason that the protagonist of Albuquerque somehow knew that the fat guy with one-nostril and A Flock of Seagulls haircut was a "hermaphrodite"....it likely involved the big brawl in the hotel room which involved various freaky forms of physical mayhem and medical procedures note Ripping out an esophagus, chewing off parts of the face, an appendectomy, a colonic irrigation.... which would surely involve removal of pants and undergarments at one point.
"Ricky" includes the lyric "every day's a rerun": The most obvious joke is that by the time of the song's release, I Love Lucy was an old show that was no longer in production but was still viewed in syndicated reruns. However, it's also an appropriate reference to make in an I Love Lucy-themed parody because Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are often credited with inventing the rerun - rather than having the show go on hiatus during Lucille's pregnancy, they had the network replay earlier episodes, something that was generally not done at the time.
"One More Minute" by "Weird Al" Yankovic is the most accurate description of putting on a brave face when confronted with heartbreak ever written. He's telling her "Psh; you're no big deal, I'd rather jump into a thumbtack pile than spend time with you," but every painful thing he describes is how living without her and watching her dating someone else feels. The only thing in the world he wants is to spend one more minute with her.
"Jurassic Park" is a snarky summary of the events of the movie, which is completely in line with Al's other parodies that are about movies or tv shows, but there's probably another reason for it - the lyric "this proves my chaos theory" implies that it's specifically from the POV of Ian Malcolm, who was the resident Deadpan Snarker throughout the movie.
The narrator of "White and Nerdy" says "keep your 40 I'll just have an Earl Grey Tea", and later he ponders whether he's a bigger fan of Kirk or Picard. Picard was notably fond of Earl Grey tea - preferring tea over malt liquor would already be considered nerdy by some, but it's nerdier still that his specific choice in tea is probably inspired by the endorsement of a fictional starship captain.
The title of the "Angry White Boy Polka" medley has been criticized as inaccurate since 1) it mixes Nu Metal with Garage Rock revival when the latter is generally considered a little less "teen angst" driven, and 2) two of the bands covered in the medley have non-white members (P.O.D. and Rage Against the Machinenote on top of that, the RATM song in question, "Renegades Of Funk", is Covered Up from an all black hip hop group, Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force). However, audiences for both Nu Metal and Garage Rock skew towards white males, so he could be calling the fans "angry white boys", not the artists.
Why is Cousin Larry calling so often in the beginning of "Trapped in the Drive-Thru"? The protagonist left his wallet at Larry's house. His wife blows it off which leads to them almost not being able to pay for their meal.
During an Al Music special on Much Music, Al reads out a fake request letter from "Tracy in Moose Jaw," who's been in the hospital for three years, asking him to show the video for Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" because it would give her a reason to go on living. Al sighs and says he can't, because it's not Canadian content, and plays Aerosmith instead. Around this time there was a controversy about some songs by Canadian artists, including that Bryan Adams hit, not counting as Canadian content for radio while some other songs by non-Canadian performers did.
"Achey Breaky Song" can be considered the inversion of the Exhort the Disc Jockey Song - most songs in the category are about telling the disc jockey to play some music, and either the song itself is not specified or it's the artist's own music (or at least their genre). "Achey Breaky Song" is a song exhorting the DJ not to play a specific song by another artist.
Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" is full of Christian motifs, from the use of "paradise" (which often refers to Heaven), the use of a choir, and even referencing Psalm 23 in the first line of the song. It actually makes a lot of sense for Weird Al's parody version to focus on the Amish, a Christian ethnoreligious group.
Al's version of Peter and the Wolf invokes this with regard to the Duck being swallowed whole by the Wolf, and therefore being alive to have its Leit Motif played at the end, pointing out that this meant that the Duck died a slow, painful death as the Wolf's digestive juices broke him down. Of course, anyone could have had that reaction to the end of the original as well.
One of the outcomes of St. Nick's rampage in "The Night Santa Went Crazy" is that the elves all got jobs working for the postal service. Hope they all received excellent PTSD counseling.
The end of "Virus Alert" contains the lyrics "What are you waiting for, forward this message to every single person that you know", as well as repeated assertions that the song should be forwarded throughout the verses. Additionally, a lot of what the Stinky Cheese virus is described as doing is just outright impossible for a computer virus to do (make you physically attracted to sheep, for example). The song was released in 2006, in the wake of some of the worst computer viruses in history, but still before good security practices were widespread among OS developers. Which means that an Alternative Character Interpretation for this song is that it's a deliberate use of social engineering to spread, bare minimum, a chain letter, while exploiting people's fear and ignorance of computer viruses to spread (this interpretation is supported by the music video, which shows that the heading for this email is "STINKY CHEESE", exactly the kind of email the song tells you NOT to open).
In "Good Old Days", the singer is guilty of three crimes (setting fire to a grocery store, murdering the manager of that grocery store, and kidnapping a teenage girl and leaving her alone somewhere in the desert). Considering he was free to do all three, it can be inferred that he escaped punishment for at least two of those.
One part of "Another Tattoo" has him state that his shopping trips are "no sweat" and "There's nothing I forget", seemingly implying that he tattoos his shopping list on himself. But since most people never buy the same things in two different shopping trips, that would mean he has to get his list tattooed on himself every time he goes shopping. Better hope he's fine with multiple tattoos. note though a less horrific interpretation could be that he tattooed a blank shopping list on himself and fills it in with washable marker every time, just so he doesn't have to worry about forgetting the list itself at home
"Trapped At The Drive-Thru" tells the story of Al and his wife going to the drive-thru for dinner. Their quest for food is derailed when Al discovers he lost his wallet and can't pay for their meal. There's actually a worse problem: if Al doesn't have his wallet with him, he also doesn't have his driver's license. Let's hope he doesn't get pulled over.
