Albums: "Weird Al" Yankovic (1983) | "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D | Dare to Be Stupid | Polka Party! | Even Worse | UHF - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff | Off the Deep End | Alapalooza | Bad Hair Day | Running with Scissors | Poodle Hat | Straight Outta Lynwood | Alpocalypse | Mandatory Fun
Films: UHF | Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is the "kinda burned" Eugene from "Trapped in the Drive-Thru" on some sort of substance or just tired after a long day's work?
- Did the drive thru worker from "Trapped in the Drive-Thru" who took Al's order forget the onions by accident, or was it deliberate as payback for Al calling her "not too bright"? The fact the animated music video has her looking angry when he calls her that could point towards the latter.
- Alternative Joke Interpretation: "Canadian Idiot" is a song packed full of Canadian stereotypes. It's meant to poke fun at Canadians for their ways of life or American nationalists who think any culture different from theirs is vastly inferior.
- Aluminum Christmas Trees:
- Those frivolous lawsuits in "I'll Sue Ya"? A lot of them were based on real ones (yes, including putting an animal in a microwave to dry it out. Thankfully, the case was thrown out).
- In "Virus Alert", you could actually buy stock in Euro Disney, as the virus did in that song. At the time it was still the name of the company, majority owned by Disney, which owned Disneyland Paris. Then Disney bought out public shareholders in 2017, but since then it's become possible for the public to buy stock in the company again.
- Crosses the Line Twice: "Weasel Stomping Day", particularly the sequence where you hear all the weasels dying. There's a reason the music video was made by Robot Chicken.
- Discredited Meme: The music video for "White & Nerdy" had Al editing Atlantic Records' Wikipedia entry with "YOU SUCK!" in large print, prompting fans and trolls to do the same to the real page. This led to Wikipedia protecting and even locking the page to prevent such vandalism.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- "Canadian Idiot" features the line "Never even bring their guns to the mall". The 2012 Toronto mall shooting
begs to differ. - A small one: on "Pancreas", Al declares that his spleen "just doesn't matter." Ten years after that song was released, he'd play a character on Bojack Horseman who comes dangerously close to dying of a twisted spleen.
- The perverted antics of Cigarettes The Cat in the John Kricfalusi-animated music video for "Close But No Cigar" are a lot more awkward in light of Kricfalusi's pedophilia allegations (one of his two victims, Katie Rice, was a layout artist on the video and claims that a lot of the harassment occurred during its production in John K's apartment). It's even worse if you see the AL TV special where Al appears afterwards saying that "you're a sick, sick person" if you enjoyed it. Al, already a huge fan of animation, often spoke fondly of John K. (going as far as to appear on the DVD of Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon") and was understandably reluctant to comment when the allegations came about.
- "Canadian Idiot" features the line "Never even bring their guns to the mall". The 2012 Toronto mall shooting
- Memetic Mutation:
- In the music video for "White and Nerdy", on the line where he says, "I edit Wikipedia", it shows him vandalizing the article for Atlantic Records with "YOU SUCK" in gigantic blue letters of Impact font. People would try to repeat that for years, to the point where they had to lock the page for a long time, even adding an explicit warning not to do it, and since 2017 it's been indefinitely semi-protected.
- "Well, he looks at me... And I look at him... And he looks at me... And I look at him..." used commonly in scenes with two characters staring at each other.
- Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Nobody enjoys hearing Al perform "Canadian Idiot" more than Canadians themselves, and it gets a big cheer when he performs there. It helps that the whole joke of the song is that it's not mocking Canadians so much as it's targeting American nationalists who are inherently distrustful of any country other than their own.
- Misaimed Fandom: People who believe Digital Piracy Is Evil tend to think "Don't Download This Song" is a straight example of the trope and use it to back their claims. The song actually satirizes the phenomenon of music artists and record companies alike overreacting to it. Al himself is fairly neutral on the subject and doesn't really care too much if people pirate his music. What he's more annoyed about is other song parodies that he didn't do showing up on file sharing sites with his name on them.
- Never Live It Down: The joke he made in "White and Nerdy" vandalizing Wikipedia's entry about Atlantic Records made people do exactly the same thing he did in real life. Due to this, as people still do that vandalism to that page nowadays, even 16 years after the song's release, now that page will be forever locked so only registered users can edit it. Wikipedia even has a comment about that phenomenon on Atlantic's page.
- Retroactive Recognition: In the music video of "White and Nerdy", the two black gangsters who look at Weird Al mowing his lawn (and get disgusted when he salutes them) are none other than Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key.
- Unconventional Learning Experience: "Pancreas" contains a lot of information about human biology, as well as a (slightly wrong) recitation of Newton's law of universal gravitation.
- Unconvincingly Unpopular Character: Nerdy Al in the "White and Nerdy" music video, per the lyrics of the song itself, is obviously meant to be a Loser Protagonist who has some supremely lame interests and tastes and gets met with disgust or rejection whenever he tries to "roll with the gangsters." That said, Al in the video is clearly very happy with his life, with a successful job, interests that give him fulfillment, friend groups that he regularly hangs out with, and, rather impressively, an insane amount of confidence about himself to the point where getting mocked or rejected doesn't even deter him. Overall, being a nerd clearly brings him happiness.
- Unintentional Period Piece:
- "I'll Sue Ya" references Toys "R" Us and Neiman-Marcus, both having since gone out of business (though the former made a small-scale comeback in the United States in The New '20s). EarthLink still exists, but it's nowhere near the dominant ISP that it was in the Turn of the Millennium. In addition, the line "I sued Ben Affleck... Aw, do I even need a reason?" comes off as rather odd now, considering Affleck has since undergone a significant Career Resurrection.
- The gag in "Trapped in the Drive-Thru" where the narrator must dig around for change because it's a cash-only business is increasingly unlikely. Due to the ubiquity of debit cards, cash-only businesses, especially restaurants, are increasingly rare in the United States, to the point that many people carry very little cash on them now. That was even truer in foreign markets, and has accelerated everywhere following the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- The music video for "White and Nerdy" has a scene where Al buys a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special from a shady character in a back alley, a reference to how hard it was to obtain at the time. Nowadays, it's more-or-less effortless to watch the whole thing on the Internet.
- Also in "White and Nerdy", Al boasts about his MySpace page being "totally pimped out". Back in 2006 when the song was released, MySpace was the top social networking site. However, it was eventually superseded by Facebook — which engages in no such ranking — and now MySpace is much more of a niche site that has nowhere near as many users.
- The four file-sharing sites mentioned in "Don't Download This Song" do not exist anymore, with Kazaa being the last to go in 2012. Grokster was shut down after the song was recorded and before it was released.
