Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Prof. Popinjay

This film was bloody brilliant. While normally I would simply leave it at that and walk away, I have to say a few things about this.

I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I was born. Pretty sure “Like a Surgeon” was playing in the delivery room. The Alapalooza album was the first music I ever purchased with my own money. Then I proceeded to buy every Weird Al album I could get my hands on after that. When I realized Weird Al did the theme to the movie Spy Hard, I set up complex equipment to record the theme from a VHS copy of Spy Hard onto an audio cassette tape so I could listen to it ad nauseum. Every time he hosted MTV, I recorded every second of it. To this day I have every one of his songs memorized. Even the latest ones.

His songs were hilarious. His songs made my mom laugh. Anything that could do that was golden. I began to value and study humor. I wrote my own song parodies. I wrote a parody of Eminem’s “My Name is” that told the story of the Nativity.

“But hold on, wait

Let me get my story straight

No one could figure out

Why Mary began to impregnate.”

I performed it at a church picnic and had the attention of one solitary dude who maintained an unchanging befuddled look on his face for the duration of my song. I stepped off stage thoroughly satisfied that I had blown one person’s mind that day.

I still write. Sometimes I write song parodies. Sometimes I write humor articles. Sometimes I write about movies that no one saw nor will ever see. He’s not the only factor that influenced me but when it came to my love of humor and writing, Weird Al Yancovic has undeniably played a major part. He’s an inspiration and a role model.

His movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” is an almost completely falsified unabashedly self-serving fever dream that culminates into a ridiculous crescendo of absurdity and I love him for every second of it. The king of parodies has turned his own biographical rockumentary film into a parody of biographical rockumentaries. It could not have been done any other way. God bless you Weird Al.