Governors Ball On Randall's Island

Quite the lineup. Tickets are $260 and go on sale Friday.

Weird Al Yankovic Scores Billboard's First #1 Comedy Album In 51 Years

Via Billboard Magazine:

After more than 30 years on the charts, comedian-singer "Weird Al" Yankovic earns his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, as "Mandatory Fun" debuts atop the list. The album is the first comedy set to top the chart since 1963, and logs the largest sales week for a comedy album since 1994. "Mandatory Fun" was released July 15 through Way Moby and RCA Records, and sold 104,000 copies in the week ending July 20, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It was promoted by a well-received daily viral video campaign that launched Monday, July 14. Starting with his parody of Pharrell's "Happy," Yankovic released eight music videos for the album through the week on various sites, like The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, Nerdist, College Humor and YouTube.

The last comedy album to hit #1 was 1963's My Son, The Nut by Allen Sherman. Steve Martin nearly got there in 1978 when Wild And Crazy Guy peaked at #2.

Weird Al - Lame Claim To Fame

Via Rolling Stone:

Another day, another new and hilarious "Weird Al" Yankovic music video. The Mandatory Fun release party continues with "Lame Claim to Fame," which takes aim at all the name-droppers as well as boasters of viral achievements. ("I posted 'First!' in the comments of a YouTube video.") Inspired musically by Southern Culture on the Skids' "Camel Walk," the trucker hat-wearing star of Yankovic's stop-motion animation video brags about having jury duty with Art Garfunkel and sharing an elevator with Christian Slater. "My best friend's brother was an extra in Wayne's World 2," Yankovic sings. "I got me an email from the prince of Nigeria… well, he sure sounded legit."

Weird Al Yankovic - Handy

The videos keep coming, one per day this week.

And now it’s come time, inevitably, for him to take on Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX’s unstoppable pop juggernaut “Fancy.” The result is “Handy,” in which Yankovic puns impressively, for three minutes, about how he’s good at fixing stuff. If you guessed that the song would include a “glue dat, glue dat” line, pat yourself on the back. The video has dancing carpenters and “Weird Al” in, for some reason, a blonde wig and a fake mustache. Also, you may notice Eddie Pepitone as the customer. It rides its one joke impressively.

Weird Al Yankovic - Foil

Weird Al is putting out a new video every day this week.

The funnyman’s latest song “Foil,” a parody of Lorde’s Grammy-winning hit “Royals,” starts out as an ode to aluminum foil. In the video, Yankovic plays the host of a cooking show who praises foil as the best way to preserve leftovers and “keep your sandwich and nice and fresh.” And then the song takes an unexpected turn, because Yankovic has another use for foil: making a tin hat. “Oh by the way I’ve cracked the code/ I figured out the shadow organizations /And the Illuminati knows / That they’re finally primed for world domination.” Despite the best efforts of his producer (played by comedian Patton Oswalt), Yankovic’s character launches into his theory about “puppet masters for a new world order,” and warns his viewers to “be aware / There’s always someone watching you.” He said he wears the tin hat made of foil to ward off “thought control rays and psychotronic scanning.”

Weird Al Yankovic - Word Crimes

Stereogum raves:

A masterfully assembled lyric video for “Word Crimes,” which transforms Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” into a slightly priggish grammar lesson. Yankovic, you see, is taking a stand against Twitter English. He’s also doing a nice take on Thicke’s smarmy falsetto and credibly delivering his version of T.I.’s verse, as well. The end result is, as you can probably imagine, a lot of fun.

2.3M views in the first day.

Tweet Of The Day: Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al has almost three million Twitter followers.

Weird Al - Perform This Way

Guys Against You Serving

Sarah Silverman, Weird Al Yankovic, John Cho, and JMG reader Dave Holmes speak out in fake support of DADT.

From Cher To Kayne

JMG reader David tips us to this actually rather fascinating look at the history of Auto-Tune from Rocketboom and Weird Al Yankovic.