Teach The Weird Accordion to Al and Guffaw Your Way To Academic Fame!

I wrote The Weird Accordion to Al for two distinct and somewhat dissimilar audiences. The first is people on the toilet. I specifically designed the book to be the kind of thing you can pick up and sift through and enjoy and then put down shortly afterwards, having both relieved your bladder and satiated your curiosity as to what I had to say about “Grapefruit Diet” or the parodies on Even Worse. 

I like to think The Weird Accordion to Al really holds together as a book, that it takes you on a giddy joy ride through four decades of pop culture and food and television and the internet and childhood and nostalgia and articulates the enduring greatness and cultural significance of a national treasure. 

But I also know that it works spectacularly well as a bathroom book that can be read in an endless series of installments and then casually re-read after or passed around like a blunt or an STD. 

Yet I also wrote it with a secondary market in mind: colleges and high schools and anywhere else people are learning about concepts like parody and pastiche and style parody and medley and satire and consumerism or any of the many other fascinating and important things Al’s career, and consequently all about. 

I wrote a book that explains concepts like parody and pastiche in fun, accessible and I like to think very funny ways while exploring, in penetrating detail, one of the most beloved performers in all of pop music in “Weird Al” Yankovic. The genius of The Weird Accordion to Al, if I may very correctly use that word to describe my own book, is that teaching it in your college class or Junior college class or class that you teach to your pet cats and iguanas and is less a conventional course than a symptom of your paralyzing loneliness gives you an excuse to play the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic IN A CLASSROOM. FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. 

How freaking awesome is that? I went to Los Angeles recently to promote my book and attend Juggalo Weekend. It was great and one of the uncontested highlights was getting to listen to the music of Al at, for example, my Weird and Insane Afternoon With Nathan Rabin event at Dynasty Typewriter, where Jonah Ray covered Al’s songs to my personal delight and Al’s music played between acts and before the show and I gotta say: just listening to Al’s ineffable oeuvre just plain makes me happy and I have listened to his stuff A LOT. Like, numerous times. And I still find great joy in it. 

I’ve devoted a lot of my twenty two years as a pop culture writer for The A.V Club, then The Dissolve, Rotten Tomatoes and the Happy Place to explaining the why of comedy, to really digging deep into the mechanics of comedy to explore what makes something funny. 

I am a big believer in the idea that studying something and understanding it on a deep, immersive level makes art more satisfying and funny, not less. Part of what makes Al such a resonant and enduring figure is that he is, in the best possible sense, an eternal student who never stops learning about music and comedy and craft and pop culture. 

These Brown professors both pledged to teach what they described as “pure literary dopeness” in their course on Twentieth Century American satire

That’s what makes his work so eminently teachable: he’s always evolving and growing within some of the most defined parameters in pop music and pop culture. Who else would even consider filling pretty much every album with an equal number of parodies of recent pop smashes and pastiches of favorite artists, combined with exactly one polka medley of contemporary hits, with a chart-ready parody as the blockbuster first track/single/music video and a long, adventurous, deranged epic as the fan-favorite final track? 

That is why I am making a humble pitch to all you egghead teachers out there: Let this Juggalo Professor educate your students about the only things in life that really matter: the songs of “Weird Al” Yankovic. By this point I feel confident in saying that I am something of an expert in the field. Or at least I have tricked Al into thinking so, and he is a pretty savvy character. 

To encourage folks to teach my book, I would be happy to do a Skype session with your class and answer questions and talk about my books about Al. I will even wear a blazer with corduroy patches and smoke a pipe pretentiously while windily discoursing on the cultural relevance of one Alfred Matthew Yankovic of Lynwood, California. 

Besides, my fellow Al scholar Lily Hirsh has a new highbrow book on Al out imminently that I blurbed so the time has clearly arrived for Al as a subject of academic study and appreciation after nearly a half century of single-handedly enriching American life. 

So watch out, halls of academia! Things are about to get a whole lot more demented, and weirder to boot. 

Ensure a future for the Happy Place and get sweet merch at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND #Buymybook at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1658788478/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0