Weird Al’s satire is apolitical, making it the perfect balm for our populist age | Canada Voices

Over his nearly half-century-long career, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s musical comedy has strayed into politics exactly twice: First in 2020, with We’re All Doomed, a YouTube upload that remixed and autotuned the first Trump-Biden debate into an original song; and then, during the 2024 election cycle, Deja Vu (But Worse) reprised the same gag with a new melody – and even more bewildering soundbites. And while Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing rants may have been a bit more facetiously edited than Joe Biden’s fuddled yammering, the videos were less partisan takedown than exasperated face-palm at a hopelessly busted system.

Weird Al is a registered Democrat, yet when he’s encouraged his fans to vote on social media, he has never endorsed a presidential candidate. And his music is almost stridently apolitical – especially for satire.

“I tend to stay away from politics,” he told Dan Rather in 2015. “When you do political humour, generally you have to take a side, which alienates half of your fanbase immediately – and I’d prefer to keep all the fans I’ve got.” (Dolly Parton has the same policy, which is either cool or depressing or meaningless, depending on how profound you consider pop singers’ influence is on American democracy.)

Like Trump, Weird Al is a deeply strange man. Unlike Trump, he’s in command of that strangeness. And unlike the President, with his brittle ego, Weird Al gladly offers his dorky self as the butt of his own jokes. If his lyrics aren’t all that funny, trafficking as they do in the schlock of open-mic comedy – Canadian Idiot is a checklist of hockey, beer, doughnuts, frostbite, maple syrup, universal health care, politeness and “aboot” burns – the ridiculous, cannily self-aware goof who delivers them makes the whole thing fun.

Despite having made a career of mimicry, Weird Al isn’t an impersonator, since whatever hat he’s wearing (cowboy, tinfoil, poodle) is never a disguise but rather an accessory to the joke. Whether posturing ironically as a grunge rocker, gangsta rapper or orthodox rabbi, behind the beards and wigs it’s always obviously Weird Al we’re laughing at – and with.

“The fact that this guy,” he once explained, pointing to himself, “is trying to dance like Michael Jackson is funny.” Such self-deprecating humility is especially refreshing when the 21st-century class of nerd celebrities (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg et al) seem mostly intent on abusing their wealth and power to ruin life for the rest of us.

Alfred Matthew Yankovic got his start in a very different era – not just for nerds. Forty-five years before his Bigger and Weirder tour brought him to Toronto in July, he landed his first Billboard hit single with Another One Rides the Bus. That was in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan had begun slapping his reactionary chokehold on the United States.

At the time, Weird Al’s music lampooned the grotesqueries of American society – its excess, its arrogance, its vapidity, its totalizing spectacle – by repackaging archetypal cultural material (cool pop music) as uncool nonsense.

In 2025, the glorious stupidity of his act operates less as social critique than as a contrapuntal refuge from the toxic stupidity of the Trump administration. Never has Weird Al’s Devo riff, Dare to Be Stupid, felt more like an anthem of resistance.

Historically, artists have rejected the twisted logic of fascist politics by embracing the absurd and irrational – see the Dadaists, the Surrealists and various like-minded movements throughout the 20th century. In the late 1920s, a group of avant-garde Soviet writers and artists formed OBERIU, a dissident collective united by a rejection of the state-sanctioned doctrine of socialist realism intended to promote Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

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A key figure in this group was the author, playwright and provocateur Daniil Kharms, whose work was both iconoclastic and bizarrely funny. Here is one of his stories, A Northern Fable, in its entirety: “An old man, for no particular reason, went off into the forest. Then he returned and said: Old woman, hey, old woman! And the old woman dropped dead. Ever since then, all rabbits are white in winter.”

Like his fellow OBERIU members, Kharms disavowed the official governance of storytelling and art by parodying the accepted modes of causality, linearity and naturalism. While there was nothing explicitly political about much of his work, for his aesthetic insubordination he was arrested several times before he finally starved to death in prison in 1942.

I’m not sure if Weird Al is a modern-day Daniil Kharms, although he does execute his formal imitation and manipulation with the same absurdist humour. And that sort of thing feels almost perversely poignant these days: When empirical truth and basic human rights no longer operate as a social foundation, what else is there to do but wear a poodle for a hat?

Democrats, led by vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, may have made a mistake labelling Republicans as “weird,” when weirdness can be such an essential tool for disarming fascist power. In their reality-rejecting absurdism, Weird Al’s presidential debate remix videos reveal the innate bankruptcy of the structures that allow populist authoritarianism to flourish.

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Meanwhile, the dominant strain of political satire (the Onion, the Beaverton, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, etc.) has begun to lose its teeth as it approaches reportage, as with the recent Onion headline “DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website,” which just extrapolates real news to a slightly more grotesque – yet increasingly possible – endpoint.

Once farce begins to backslide into tragedy, what is the satirist to do? Weird Al embodies Vladimir Nabokov’s discrepancy that “satire is a lesson, parody is a game” – a game that doesn’t require the good-faith dialogue of explicit commentary; a game that makes up its own rules as it goes. And it’s fun to watch Weird Al play. His July 9 concert packed thousands of Hawaiian-shirted, bewigged and giddy fans around Toronto’s Budweiser Stage, and for a few hours everyone was happy – and happily Tacky, per the live video walkthrough that opened the show.

Weird Al puts on what is at once a parody of a rock concert and a really good rock concert. At least half his backing musicians – undisputedly the most successful cover band ever – have been with him since the 1980s, and together they dispatch a tight, exuberant set, complete with multiple costume changes, video montages and a flashy light show.

But what was most striking about the whole night was the ecstatic camaraderie in the crowd. While billionaire nerds insidiously exploit and weaponize social alienation for political and financial gain, Weird Al makes feeling like a geeky outcast a point of connection and community. (From White and Nerdy: “Got skills, I’m a champion at D&D / MC Escher, that’s my favourite MC.”) In full comic flight, onstage, Weird Al looks at once stunned and joyful, provocative and deranged. And as he pumps away on his accordion at one of his polka medleys, there’s a look of stupefaction on his face – like, “Can you believe I’m pulling this off?”

So what is Weird Al? A jester. A weirdo. A singular chameleon who is always identifiably himself. No musical comedy act comes close to his level of success (three Grammys, more than 12 million albums sold). No one does what he does – even similar acts such as Flight of the Conchords and the Lonely Island tend to ape genres and styles more than artists or songs. In embracing his own, very specific weirdness, Weird Al has become as iconic a pop artist as Prince or Björk. Although he hasn’t inspired the slavish fan-mania of Beliebers or Swifties, his music has the same ability to unite people – albeit in a kind of unholy testament of the gleefully moronic and the exuberantly inane.

It would be disingenuous to attribute political motivation or some bipartisan miracle to the harmony Weird Al engendered in Toronto in July. He didn’t rant about fascism from the stage or, as American artists seem inclined to do when they come to Canada, apologize for his country, beg for a citizenship marriage or pander to the audience with compliments about how few of us were carrying handguns. He just sang his silly songs, danced his silly dances, played his silly videos and permitted 15,000 strangers into his world of demented, mostly harmless play.

The concert ended with the stage populated with various Star Wars characters and the crowd hollering along to his Lola parody, Yoda (“Yo-yo-yo-yo, Yoda.”) As the lights came up, I realized someone had spilled beer all over my Hawaiian shirt. I didn’t care. How could I? Drifting back into the city amid scores of fellow nerds, I felt buoyed by the reprieve from, you know, everything – and, even as that elation faded, glad and grateful to have been part of something so triumphantly, liberatingly weird, if even just for a little while.