'Weird Al' Yankovic

An accordion, a comedy song, and a radio show: that is the whole origin. Alfred Matthew Yankovic got a track aired on The Dr. Demento Radio Show in 1976, at sixteen, and turned it into a career that now runs to more than 12 million albums sold, over 150 parodies and originals, and more than 2,000 live shows.

The music is the career. The acting is the long-running joke that grew up beside it, and most of his screen credits are Weird Al Yankovic playing himself: in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, again in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, in Spy Hard, in Halloween II, in How to Be a Latin Lover, and once more in The Naked Gun in 2025, which makes four films in that series across thirty-seven years.

UHF in 1989 is the exception and the only leading role in this list, as George Newman. It is the closest thing to a feature-length version of what the albums do, parody built as its own reason for existing. The other exception is Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, the biographical film in which he plays someone other than himself, a joke entirely in keeping with the rest of it.

Voice work has kept him busiest lately, usually as a heightened self or as something absurd: Banana Man in Adventure Time, Milo Murphy in Milo Murphy's Law, Wreck-Gar in Transformers: Animated, Dr. Screwball Jones in Wander Over Yonder. The Grammys, when they came, came for the comedy albums and the packaging around them.