Pop Reviews : Weird Al Goes Right for the Refrigerator

There’s that school of thought that says rock ‘n’ roll is reducible entirely to sex and sex alone. Which is really overestimating the maturity of the whole exercise. Weird Al Yankovic is willfully stuck in a state of arrested development way, way pre-puberty, focusing with the single-minded intensity of an infant on another extremely basic instinct: food.

At the Wiltern Theatre on Friday, the pop parodist pulled out his full doggy bag of munchie songs, starting off with “Addicted to Spuds” (per Robert Palmer, complete with white shirt and skinny tie), leading into “Taco Grande” (after Gerardo), followed by “Lasagna” (a la “La Bamba”). This all even preceded Yankovic’s “fabulous food medley,” a smorgasbord including such oldies as “Whole Lotta Lunch” and newer choices like “The White Stuff” (a celebration of Oreo middles, in the style of the New Kids’ “Right Stuff”).

The inevitable climax: “Fat,” with the spoofster in the heavy-poundage makeup of his famous Michael Jackson-parodying video.

Inasmuch as nearly half Yankovic’s set was a variation on this riff, you could read his whole sweets-crazed career as a pungent satire of hormone-obsessed pop music, merely substituting one primal obsession for another.

Individually, Yankovic’s ditties are usually childishly funny when he sticks to food, not so when he ventures onto other silly subjects. From a grown-up perspective, his spoofs suffer from his unwillingness to take real potshots at anyone (with the recent exception of “Smells Like Nirvana,” which cleverly mocks Kurt Cobain’s mush-mouthedness and haircut). Weird Al is really Gentle Al, the eternal, outsize-appetited, non-malignant kid figure in every way.