The Big Squeeze: Day Forty-One: "Here's Johnny" from Polka Party!
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with two big objectives in mind. First and foremost, I wanted to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I wanted to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and over 27 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name.
Author’s Commentary: Al has an uncanny feel for what will endure in pop culture. He didn’t just parody songs that were popular: he spoofed songs that were massive, ubiquitous, that made an indelible imprint that ensured they would not be forgotten.
That’s not true of every song Al parodied, of course. The El DeBarge solo smash “Who’s Johnny”, for example, has not endured. It has not gotten more important and beloved with time.
“Who’s Johnny” is, at the very least half-forgotten. But it’s not just the song and the singer that have faded with time. History has similarly half-forgotten Short Circuit, the surprise blockbuster that gave the world this irritatingly infectious wad of R&B-inflected bubblegum pop, and it sure forgot the bizarre music video for “Who’s Johnny” that tried to implement the film into its confusing narrative without having access to either star Steve Guttenberg or wacky robot hero Johnny 5.
So perhaps it’s fitting that history has mostly forgotten Ed McMahon, the subject of Al’s parody as well. That’s fitting, since he was always the most ephemeral and disposable of celebrities, the quintessential guy who got lucky and became famous for being famous.
Like its inspiration, “Here’s Johnny” is a fizzy, dizzy trifle, albeit one with an unmistakable tacky charm all the same.
Original Weird Accordion to Al article:
If you were to judge only by the originals, Polka Party! would rank right up there with In 3-D and Dare To Be Stupid. Unfortunately, the first sizable flop of Al’s career was hampered by some of his weakest parodies. “Toothless People” marked one of the only times in “Weird Al” Yankovic’s career that his gift for picking out monster, enduring hits deserted him.
You know how you can tell that “Toothless People” was not a hit song that people remember or cared about? Because it’s a Mick Jagger solo song, that’s why. And nobody other than Jann Wenner likes those, and he only pretends to like them to remain on Jagger’s good side.
“Toothless People” was the first time Al was parodying a song that didn’t seem to be much of a hit at all, and certainly hasn’t endured the way a shocking amount of the songs Al has parodied have. “Here’s Johnny”, another of Al’s weaker tracks from the era, at least had the benefit of being a parody of a ubiquitous smash the radio-listening audience of the era undoubtedly knew, and probably memorized, whether they wanted to or not. It was that huge.
The song in question is El Debarge’s fiendishly catchy earwig “Who’s Johnny?” from the Short Circuit soundtrack. Despite being the hit theme to a blockbuster science-fiction comedy, “Who’s Johnny?” has one of the weirdest, most threadbare music videos for a hit soundtrack song I’ve ever seen.
The idea is to be Short Circuit-themed and follow the movie’s narrative in some way. While Ally Sheedy, ever the trooper, forgot enough of her dignity to star in the video, the best they can muster otherwise is a cardboard standee of Steve Guttenberg and a mischief-causing generic robot arm that is supposed to represent at least part of Johnny Five, the movie’s ostensibly lovable, child-like sentient robot. It’s a lighthearted video for an instantly disposable wad of bubblegum R&B that I’ve compulsively re-watched several times and it seems to somehow make less sense with each viewing.
“Here’s Johnny” finds Al once again wading into the warm, comforting waters of television and obsession with a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a semi-forgotten figure who, like Vanna White, the subject of another Al song that has not exactly aged like fine wine, became famous for doing not much of anything at all.
Ed McMahon and Vanna White weren’t Warholian celebrities necessarily. Instead, they were unusually pure creatures of television who lucked into a dream gig early in their careers that paid them insane amounts of money for sitting and laughing, and turning letters on a giant board, respectively.
“Here’s Johnny” is consequently a silly, upbeat-sounding bubblegum pop song about something equally silly, if not sillier: the sedentary yet richly compensated career of America’s favorite talk- show sidekick.
On “Here’s Johnny” Al assumes the perspective of another one of his demented, monomaniacal obsessives. Throughout his career, Al has gotten inside the skin and warped psyches of people whose lives are magically transformed by the silliest and most ephemeral things. “Here’s Johnny” is no different. The singer is not just a fan. Unique among television viewers at the time, the singer worships the stocky personification of beefy mediocrity as “such a cool dude” whose mere existence makes his “life worth living.”
“Watch him selling beer and dog food” Al sings later in the song, returning yet again to the field of television advertising, where McMahon was able to leverage a lifetime of sitting on a couch and laughing excessively at Johnny Carson’s jokes into a similarly lucrative, similarly cushy gig reading cue cards in commercials.
The problem with “Here’s Johnny” is that Ed McMahon is just too fat and easy a target, and I don’t mean that as a comment on his appearance. So perhaps there's a strange, pleasing synchronicity in an irritatingly tacky, inescapable pop song that's too sadistically catchy for its own good being used to ever so gently spoof a tacky, inescapable TV treasure who was endearing and oddly memorable not despite his cheesiness, but because of it.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Buy the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL with dozens more illustrations and a new cover as well as over a hundred pages of new material covering every facet of Al’s career, including The Complete Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for just $23.00, signed copy . tax + USA domestic shipping included here or from Amazon here