Weird Like a Fox

By their very nature, novelty records and the musicians who make them are transitory. Sheb Wooley never again got remotely close to the top 10 after his six-week ride at No. 1 in 1958 with “The Purple People Eater.” And has anyone heard from Los Del Rio since “Macarena” four years ago?

So how come “Weird Al” Yankovic, like the Eveready Bunny, just keeps going and going 20 years after his debut?

“I think one of the reasons I’ve been around so long is because I don’t like to step on people’s toes,” said Yankovic, who plays Wednesday at the Orange County Fair in Costa Mesa. “I don’t want to offend them. I want to maintain my positive relationships with all the people I’ve done takeoffs on.”

Even Spike Jones, probably Yankovic’s most successful predecessor in the world of novelty records, saw his streak of hits end after a little more than 10 years. Ray Stevens charted novelty hits over nearly 20 years between 1961 and 1979 but interspersed them with such straightforward material as “Mr. Businessman” and “Everything Is Beautiful.”

One way Yankovic keeps on the good side of artists’ whose recordings he lampoons is by asking permission before he goes to work.

“Typically, I’ll come up with a concept and run it by the artist to see if he or she has a sense of humor about it,” said Yankovic, who has ditched his signature pencil-thin mustache and eyeglasses (after his recent corrective laser surgery.) “If they don’t think it’s funny, which is very rare, I’ll drop it immediately.

“I can be kind of a sick puppy, but personally, I prefer my humor to be a little more gentle. Not toothless, mind you, but I think you can have fun with a subject without being derogatory or mean-spirited.”

As a result, Yankovic said, he’s received compliments from some artists whose work he’s parodied. He said Kurt Cobain liked his “Smells Like Nirvana” and commented: “I knew we made it as a band when I saw the Weird Al parody on MTV.”

But it doesn’t always work.

Rapper Coolio publicly denounced “Amish Paradise,” Yankovic’s 1996 parody of “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Yankovic said he wrote and recorded based incorrectly on information he received that Coolio approved of the idea. He added that he has sent Coolio a letter of apology but that he has yet to get a response.

He also benefited from arriving about the same time as MTV, so his takeoffs of hits by Michael Jackson, the Police, Madonna and others had the added punch of his comedy videos.

It’s tempting to picture Yankovic as the class goof-off always going for a laugh, someone who cracked jokes instead of his books.

In fact, Alfred Matthew Yankovic was an extremely bright student, not only graduating at 16 from Lynwood High School, but doing so as class valedictorian.

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The Downey native continued his studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, eventually earning an architecture degree. But in 1979, bored with the rigidity of his formal education, Yankovic turned college disc jockey and recorded “My Bologna,” his spoof of the Knack’s smash, “My Sharona.”

That record was a turning point in his career; it became a staple on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento radio show, a novelty-based program that subsequently aired a live recording of his Queen parody, “Another One Rides the Bus.”

Yankovic signed his first recording contract a few years later and began cranking out a string of hit singles and videos followed, including “I Love Rocky Road,” “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Yoda,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” “Jurassic Park” and “Bedrock Anthem.”

He has reached as high as No. 14 on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart, with 1996’s “Bad Hair Day,” which stayed on the chart for a full year and sold 2 million copies. His new “Running With Scissors,” released three weeks ago, is comfortably positioned at No. 16 this week.

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What made a straight-A student devote his life to the pursuit of the silly?

“Humor has always been a part of my life . . . a defense mechanism of sorts,” he said recently by cell phone while en route from his Hollywood home to an online chat-room session in Los Angeles. “I guess I’ve always been known as being a little weird. . . . I’ve also had more than one girlfriend say to me, ‘Aren’t you ever serious?’ ”

Yankovic, 39, said he discovered later that being an entertainer offered a near-perfect fit.

“I’m thankful that I have a job where I can sit around my house, watch bad TV and rationalize that I’m working--I’m researching pop culture,” he said.

“At the same time, I don’t always listen to the radio for the express purpose of figuring out how I can screw up someone’s lyrics,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing that nags in my brain.”

True to form, the new album tweaks numerous icons of pop culture.

“The Saga Begins” parodies “The Phantom Menace,” to the music of Don McLean’s “American Pie”; “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” puts a decidedly religious spin on the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)”; and in “My Baby’s in Love With Eddie Vedder,” Yankovic laments, “I knew we were headin’ for disaster / When she caught me hangin’ out at the Ticketmaster.”

Yankovic has been criticized for what some see as making a tidy living primarily off other people’s creativity.

He counters that nearly half of his recorded material is original. Plus, he suggests, his longevity is the best evidence that he’s doing something right.

“Everybody has their detractors, and it’s pretty easy to take potshots at someone like me,” he said. “Every 12-year-old in the world does parodies of songs they hear on the radio. That was me, too. Only somehow I never grew out of it.”

“I know that my career, in part, is based on timing and taking advantage of phenomena in our culture, like ‘Star Wars.’ Still, there’s a big difference between just changing a song’s words around and making them consistently funny over a long period of time,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of craft and imagination that goes into what I do.”

“I work hard because it’s an all-encompassing job,” he added. “I’m a control freak and I can get anal about details, so it leaves little time for a social life and sleep. But I’m not complaining . . . it’s a blast.”

* Weird Al Yankovic plays Wednesday at the Arlington Theater at the Orange County Fair, 88 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. 7 and 9 p.m. Shows are free with fair admission, $2-$6. (714) 708-3247.