Entertainment

With Weird Al, nerdy America found its hero

We did it, Nerd America.

Weird Al Yankovic has been winning the Internet this week with his daily release of eight new videos from his new album, “Mandatory Fun.”

But look behind those videos and what you’ll see is the 30-year-long history of the rise of the nerdocracy in America, which has gone from a niche, put-down segment of the population to the main cultural driving force, the engine that powers social media, music tastes and even this era of Brooklyn-y, superprecise indexing of food.

That’s right: Think back to the simpler time of the 1980s and remember that liking Weird Al wasn’t cool. Sure, my circle of friends loved him, like we loved quoting “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” or collecting issues of Nintendo Power.

But pop culture on the whole still never knew what to do with Weird Al. Take for example his only appearance on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” where Carson just can’t quite wrap his head around Weird Al as he plays “Yoda,” his spoof on The Kinks’ “Lola.”

On Tuesday, Yankovic released his 14th (!!) album, and, amazingly, his last few albums have been some of his most popular yet. After all, as I said in my recent interview with him, if someone walked up to you in 1984 and said in 30 years Weird Al would be at the top of his game, and Michael Jackson would be a dead weirdo, would you have believed them?

Yet in those 30 years, culture changed, in a very good way. It’s glib to say the nerds have inherited the earth, but we’ve certainly got our agenda to the top of the cultural inbox.

Technology went from something the A/V club cared about to something everyone needed to make their personal computer work (we elevated some of them to “Genius” status at the Apple store, even). File sharing made music democratic so that everyone can be a skilled DJ with a catalog of deep-cuts that goes beyond pop-radio garbage.

In 1989, filmmakers were nervous that Tim Burton’s “Batman” would bomb with mainstream audiences; now studios are scraping the bottom of the comic book franchise barrell so hard that even obscure stinkers get thrown up on the big screen.

Meanwhile, Weird Al’s form of humor (once considered juvenile for things like switching “Fat” for “Bad”) has grown up. Well, maybe grown up is the wrong phrase; it’s more that the people who liked it have grown up, and found nothing wrong with it after all.

YouTube spawned a generation of DIY Weird Als, who can put together their own parodies in no time. Yet we still look at Al as the king, the OG, simply because he’s been killing it in this game for decades.

The three new videos released so far have gone super viral — and Tuesday’s video, “Word Crimes,” a spoof on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” is maybe one of his best accomplishments to date. The song, while being funny and clever, manages to be actually educational too, sort of like a “Schoolhouse Rock!” song for the LOL generation.

But it’s also nerdy about language and grammar, in a way that we word people usually annoy our friends with. “Word Crimes” is a vindication for all those years of correcting people for saying “less” when they meant “fewer” or saying “literally” when they meant “figuratively.”

So far, it seems like the hit song off the new album, which Yankovic has said will probably be his last traditional album. After that, he’ll go more toward digital distribution.

Years ago, that might have been considered a nerdy thing to do. Now the world can’t wait for the next missive from President Al of Nerd America.