"Weird Al" Yankovic: Dare To Be Stupid : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Sitting down with this year's summer crop of comedy records is a little like having the proverbial dinner in a Chinese restaurant – one from column A and so on. Every time you think you've found a working general description, somebody passes you something you don't recognize.

Of all the dishes here, the one that's least likely to leave you hungry an hour later is the most traditional of the bunch. Emo Philips, a Midwesterner who has spent nine years becoming a star and looks like he hasn't eaten for the last five of them, couldn't owe more to the borsch belt if he'd sunk all his money in beet futures. "I'd like to get married," he'll say. "I don't know, though. You get married and the first thing you know, you've got a wife."

Take my wife. Please.

What distinguishes Emo from Henny Youngman is that, for starters, Emo does his entire routine in a voice that sounds like he swallowed a large handful of pills in the dark and different colors are kicking in at different times. As shticks go, it's a good one, and combined with Emo's appropriately syncopated timing, it induces large laughs even for medium-sized lines: "My brother says hello – so hurray for speech therapy" and "She reminded me of the Sphinx: her nose was shot off by French soldiers."

Emo indulges sparingly in his fondness for the macabre ("Something caught my eye ... and dragged it fifteen feet"), sensibly spending most of his time on more solid and traditional ground. "When I was ten, my parents moved to Downers Grove, Illinois," he says. "When I was twelve, I found them." Or, "My dad had very strict rules for me ... rules like, oh, I couldn't be home until a certain hour." Hello, Mr. Dangerfield?

At his best, Emo pulls bizarre creatures from familiar hats. When he was young, he says, other kids would tease him and he'd chase after them. "But lucky for them, the chain would snap my neck back and they would escape." It ain't Lenny Bruce, and it might not mean fat movie roles. But it's funny, and in comedy that should count for something.

Which brings us to Sandra Bernhard, whose I'm Your Woman already has a death grip on the 1986 Grammy for Most Puzzling Album. All divisions.

Bernhard is a funny stand-up comic ("Did you ever think you'd see lips like this on a white girl?") who does no stand-up here, just spoken introductions to eight songs, and that's where it gets puzzling. The introductions aren't funny and the songs aren't funny, and as the record wears on, a suspicion starts to form that therefore they are supposed to be serious. Like Barbra Streisand or Edith Piaf.

Now that is funny. Unfortunately, not funny enough to justify the cost of an entire album – production or purchase. Bernhard's voice is all right, and producer Barry Reynolds (writer-arranger for Marianne Faithfull and Grace Jones) has programmed the all-right band to play all-right 1980s pop music. It's even all right when many of the lyrics sound like polished-up versions of remarks one might have made offhandedly to one's therapist ("As I pull off my sweater/I wonder how many people/Would like my breasts/Pressed against theirs").

Problem is, if we're to read this as a personal statement – and again, the fact that it's not funny encourages us to do so – we're facing a character far more troubled than any of Emo's cartoons. When Bernhard writes, "The TV glows, but it isn't on/You start to fear the things you see/'Cause your mind is gone," we don't know how to react. If it's true, we can't laugh. If it's not, is this then the joke, that this normal-looking woman has written and is now singing some sort of, what, neopunk song?

I'm Your Woman comes with a sticker warning that it contains "objectionable language that may not be suitable for children or puritans." What might be more appropriate is a generic sticker that just says "Warning," and let the listener figure out later what he or she wants to be warned about. It's that kind of record.

Joe Piscopo's New Jersey is not. No backdoor therapy here, just good old Joe, parodying a dozen characters with undisguised affection. The uptempo, echo-laden "Honeymooners Rap," for instance, is lavish and perfect, as Joe and Eddie Murphy put a half dozen Honeymooner routines into rap cadence.

Piscopo's Sinatra has more reverence than humor, making it more interesting onstage than on record. But his Bruce Springsteen parody, called "New Jersey," is the best yet in the admittedly narrow field of musical satire. It demonstrates Piscopo's ear for nuance in the work of other artists, much the same way that the record as a whole suggests, ironically, that he has yet to develop a strong Joe Piscopo character.

A case in point is the opening routine, in which Joe runs into Rocky and Bullwinkle in some little joint in Mexico and they end up ragging one another about having sunk to the taco-stand circuit. It's a moderately amusing bit, charming in its self-effacement, but not necessarily the kind of thing that's going to put rocket thrusters on Piscopo's career.

Nor is "I Wanna Sound Like a Black Man," which is funny to people who are interested in the black-white dynamic of popular music, but otherwise marginal. In Joe's defense, it might be noted that even for its geniuses musical satire seems to lead at best to advertising (Stan Freberg), professorships (Tom Lehrer) or PBS (Mark Russell).

This doesn't come as news to Weird Al Yankovic, who has subverted conventional wisdom by having several "one-shot" parody hits ("My Bologna," "Eat It"), but he still must sometimes suspect he gets the respect that's left over when Emo and Rodney are finished.

The problem, frankly, is that a lot of people out there think that anyone can make up song parodies and that Al just lucked out to get his own record. Al knows they think this, which is one reason he's now trying hard to push songs that aren't rewrites, like "Dare to Be Stupid" ("Mashed potatoes can be your friends") and "Slime Creatures from Outer Space."

The pick of this album's original litter is "One More Minute," which is a parody of a style (Fifties vocal group) rather than a specific song and is a superb tune besides – right down to the perfect little gasp right before the final chorus. What's superb for Weird Al, of course, isn't the same as what's superb for, say, Lena Horne: "One More Minute" goes, in part, "I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass/Than spend one more minute with you."

Therein, of course, lies part of the problem. Al obviously can't drop the weird part and still have an act, nor can he get away from the now-obligatory parodies: "Girls Just Want to Have Lunch," "I Want a New Duck" ("One that won't steal my beer"). Al is probably doomed always to live in fear that his latest project will mark the point at which we lose interest. The good news is that Dare to Be Stupid probably isn't it.

Which leaves us with Billy Crystal, who isn't singing. Yet. But then, it's only been a year since Saturday Night Live certified his long-running career as an overnight success, so he may still be enjoying the fact that when he stands up now, people listen. In return, at least on this record, he gives those people what they want – which often means that unlikeliest of parody star vehicles, Fernando. It also means the record is built on traditional comic elements, though Crystal is only semitraditional, weaving back and forth between monologues and rapid-fire multicharacter exchanges. Mahvelous! has a New York skew at times (with jokes about local talk-show host Joe Franklin), but like any good borsch belter, Crystal focuses on the timeless and placeless. Meeting a girl's father before a date, for instance ("Ever seen a .38?").

Although his imitations range from good to outstanding, Crystal's real appeal is his quickness, and that's one of the things a record can capture reasonably well. The long opening bit is so hypnotic that the absurdity of the dialogue between Crystal and SNL colleague Christopher Guest becomes almost incidental (which is, of course, the intent). Each character takes his turn saying he stuck a meat thermometer in his ear, or ate an anchovy on a cruller, then whines, "I hate when that happens."

No, it's not Lenny Bruce. None of these folks are. And neither are Bill and Dan and Chevy and Eddie, and maybe we're the worse for it. But then, Lenny Bruce never got rich.