[Long profile by a journalist who joined him on tour of the career and personage of Alfred Matthew Yankovic, the most famous and long-lived comedic music musician in the world, lasting where other novelty hits have long since faded; over the past 44 years, after emerging from a hilariously-repressed childhood, his parodies have become an institution and a marker of pop/rock music success.
Why is he so popular? Weird Al appeals to weird outsiders and the unappreciated by deflating the pretensions of rock stars, by being incorrigibly nice and dedicated to his fans despite being deeply introverted, and because he is a genuinely talented performer who gives great concerts and spends months agonizingly perfecting every last lyric of his parodies.]
…The connection is so deep that it is more like a merging, and after a while it struck me that Weird Al has spent basically his whole life making his music for exactly these people, which is to say for his childhood self. For many decades, he has been trying to delight Alfred Yankovic, the bright, painfully shy kid who grew up alone in his tiny bedroom. For the benefit of that lonely boy, he reshaped the whole world of pop culture. His ridiculous music sent out a pulse, a signal, and these were the people it drew: the odd, the left out. A crowd of friends for that lonely kid. As I watched him with his fans, sometimes I felt as if Weird Al was multiplying all around me, multiplying inside of me. We were one crowd, united in isolation, together in a great collective loneliness that—once you recognized it, once you accepted it—felt right on the brink of being healed.