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‘Weird Al’ Yankovic hits No. 1 on Billboard chart with ‘Mandatory Fun’

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It’s strange but true: “Weird Al” Yankovic, the pop-song parodist who seemed to peak in popularity in the mid 1980s, finally scored his first No. 1 album this week.

“Mandatory Fun,” Yankovic’s 14th studio disc, topped the Billboard 200 chart Wednesday with sales of 104,000 copies in the week that ended July 20, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

“If you’d told me 30 years ago this would happen, I never would’ve believed it,” the singer wrote early Wednesday on Twitter. “If you’d told me 2 WEEKS ago, I never would’ve believed it.”

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As Billboard’s Keith Caulfield points out, “Mandatory Fun” is the first comedy album to hit No. 1 on the tally since 1963, when Allan Sherman’s “My Son, the Nut” -- made famous by “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp)” -- spent eight weeks there.

With parodies of well known tunes by Lorde, Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, among others, Yankovic’s album arrived accompanied by a series of music videos that earned widespread attention on the Internet last week. The clip for “Word Crimes” -- a grammar-inspired redo of Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” -- has been viewed over 10 million times on YouTube.

Behind “Mandatory Fun,” Jason Mraz entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2 with his latest set of mellow folk-pop ditties, “Yes!,” followed by the Chicago punk band Rise Against at No. 3 and “Kidz Bop 26” at No. 4.

Twitter: @mikaelwood

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