Ebert Vs. Al

As the final component in the soon to be released Ill-Advised, Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to Al, I spent Father’s Day weekend re-watching UHF and writing a 6000 word essay about it. 

Over the course of my research I read Roger Ebert’s review of UHF during its famously disastrous theatrical release. I knew Ebert did not care for the movie but I was taken aback by the sheer brutality of his review, which posits the movie less as an amiable comedy that didn’t quite work for him than an unforgivable insult to the intelligence and taste of moviegoers that he must personally avenge. 

The first sentence establishes a tone of casual cruelty: “Somewhere there is an audience for "UHF," I have no doubt, and somewhere this weekend someone may laugh at some of its attempts at humor.” The first paragraph concludes with an even meaner, even pithier jab in “Those who laugh at "UHF" should inspire our admiration; in these dreary times we must treasure the easily amused.”

The Pulitzer Prize winner rushes summarily through the plot summary so he can get to a critique of Al as an actor that veers unbecomingly into sadism, writing of the beloved pop icon, “Yankovic also has a problem with his leading actor - himself. He doesn't have the edge and confidence he needs to carry a movie like this, and his physical presence is undermined by bad posture and an indistinct speaking voice. He needs to practice throwing back his shoulders and strutting; he creates a dispirited vacuum at the center of many scenes.”

Ebert comes off more like a stern etiquette instructor barking at a client to stand up straight and speak forcefully and crisply than a critic writing about the goofball hero and straight man of an amiable slobs versus snobs comedy. 

Ebert closes with the kind of clever cruelty I’ve always enjoyed when not directed at something I love and feel a deep connection with, writing of Al’s sole cinematic vehicle, “The result is a very unfunny movie. I did not record a single laugh during the running time of the film, and although I admittedly saw the movie at a press screening and not on a Saturday matinee at the multiplex in the mall, I wonder how many laughs there will be when the movie does go public. It's routine, predictable, and dumb - real dumb.”

Reading the review at the end of the three and a half year long period researching and writing a book venerating the music, film and television career of “Weird Al” Yankovic inspired powerfully conflicting emotions, particularly after having just re-watched UHF twice and finding it very funny both times. 

I love Roger Ebert. He was not just one of my all-time favorite film critics, he was one of my favorite writers, period. I often disagreed with Ebert’s opinions during his lifetime and I’m regularly gobsmacked by some of his takes, like his three and a half star rave for 1994’s Junior. 

But no one can deny the passion and commitment Ebert brought to his work or the sheer pleasure of reading his prose. 

Al and Roger Ebert were titans of my 1980s childhood whom I spent much of my adult life trying to impress, with surprisingly successful results. Ebert blurbed my first book, The Big Rewind and Al asked me to write his coffee table book and volunteered to copy-edit as well as fact-check both versions of The Weird Accordion to Al. 

One of the things I loved about Ebert was his fundamentally democratic nature. He may have been the most popular and powerful film critic in the world when he thrust his thumb way down for UHF but he viewed his reviews as conversation starters, not incontrovertible judgments handed down from the mountain by an all-knowing cinematic prophet.  

If Ebert were alive I would love to send him the extended version of The Weird Accordion to Al as a way of continuing a conversation begun in a characteristically conversational review where he asks a series of rhetorical questions I am nevertheless uniquely qualified to answer at this point, having spent nearly two decades as a professional film critic and about four years writing and researching Al’s life’s work for a series of books. I can vouch that people not only laughed at UHF; they never stopped laughing. They’re laughing at UHF now and they will still be laughing at UHF fifty years from now.

In the end I’m grateful for Ebert’s glowering evisceration, even if it does seem more than a little odd that the man who gave the world the enduring treasure that is the screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seemed to think the essence of wacky, lowbrow comedy was discipline and good posture.

Ebert’s pan provided a framework for the end of my lengthy appreciation of UHF and its weirdly enduring goofball charms. 

UHF might not have inspired guffaws at critic’s screenings, and it may have flopped at the box-office, but the enduring cult success of a movie the world was ready to write off as a hopeless failure three days after its theatrical release has become impossible to deny over three decades later. 

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And, of course, you CAN and SHOULD pick up the Happy Place’s very first book, The Weird Accordion to Al, a lovingly illustrated deep dive into the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic, with an introduction from Al himself here or here