“Weird Al” Yankovic: The Mandatory World Tour

Few would have guessed that “Weird Al” Yankovic, who as a shy, accordion-playing teenager got his start sending in homemade tapes to the Dr. Demento Radio Show, would go on to become the biggest-selling comedy recording artist in history with over 12 million album sales. Now in his fourth career decade, he has won 4 Grammys (with 14 nominations) and countless awards and accolades for Weird Al classics like “Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon,” “Fat,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” “Amish Paradise” and “The Saga Begins.”

His 14^th studio album Mandatory Fun features parodies of some of the biggest hits of recent years, including Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” (“Tacky”), Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (“Word Crimes”), Lorde’s “Royals” (“Foil”), Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (“Handy”) and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” (“Inactive”).

Mandatory Fun debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. This is the first time that a comedy album has debuted at #1 on the chart in history, and the first time that a comedy album has reached the top of the chart in over 50 years. Further in the spirit of Mandatory Fun’s bid for world domination, Al released 8 music videos in 8 days which had over 46 million views combined in its first week.

In addition to his recordings and world-famous music videos, Yankovic is also well-known for his cult-hit feature film UHF , his late ‘90s CBS Saturday morning series The Weird Al Show and the numerous AL-TV specials that he’s made for MTV and VH1 over the years. Most recently Al was seen playing himself in the hit television series, The Goldberg’s.

Weird Al, along with his band of over three decades, has performed thousands of live rock and comedy multimedia shows throughout the world, and are back on the road in 2016 for The Return Of…The Mandatory Tour.