The Big Squeeze: Day Sixty-Three "Spatula City" from UHF
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 want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero. Even more importantly, I want 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: I belong to a Facebook group called “That fictional character does not support this statement” devoted to memes prominently featuring fictional characters who, needless to say, would not support the words or ideas being attributed to them.
In the group someone posted a meme from a right-wing page called Caveman Humor of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker—truly the best thing to happen to creators of shitty memes since Heath Ledger’s Joker—accompanied by the words “2020 Ain’t Shit, Wait Until 2021 Pops Off With a Civil War And Y’All Gun Haters Have To Defend Your Home With a Spatula and a Dildo.”
Out of morbid curiosity I clinked on the link and was unsurprised but dissapointed to find a lot of the commenters sharing gifs of “Spatula City” or images of Spatula City or Spatula City references.
Here’s the thing: Al belongs to everyone. He appeals to everyone. He’s universal. That includes people who comment on right-wing meme pages and vote for racist, xenophobic monsters like Donald Trump and make a big show of backing the blue because the idea that Black Lives Matter scares them in ways they cannot articulate lucidly or even admit to themselves.
As an author and “Weird Al” Yankovic fan that’s something I just have to live with. That’s part of the reason I removed all the Trump references from the book: I don’t like it when other people combine their love of Al with politics I not only don’t share but find offensive and divisive. So I understand how people on the other side of the fence politically might feel insulted when I combine my love of Al with my Progressive political beliefs.
Original Weird Accordion to Al article:
I don’t remember much about the various books of Malcolm Gladwell, the prolific author who has become extraordinarily popular and successful due to his peerless ability to make ordinary Americans feel smart, and even vaguely intellectual, without taxing them too much intellectually, or at all.
But I do very vividly remember Gladwell’s concept of “stickiness.” “Stickiness” refers to something’s seemingly ineffable ability to endure, to last, to stick around in the minds and hearts of the public long after seemingly more popular and important and substantive art has been forgotten. The concept of "stickiness" itself possesses the quality of stickiness, which is either deeply ironic, or perfect, or maybe nobody actually understands the true nature of irony anymore except, ironically enough, Alanis Morrissette.
The Big Lebowski, for example, is a great illustration of stickiness. The Coen Brothers’ stoner masterpiece was initially greeted largely with a shrug, as a weird, intentionally silly and ephemeral goof following the Oscar-winning triumph of Fargo. But instead of receding in the cultural imagination, The Big Lebowski has only gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. That’s because the grand gestalt of the smart-ass comedy exudes stickiness, but so do countless individual elements, from the Dude’s White Russians to his wardrobe to his endlessly quoted catchphrases.
UHF similarly embodies Gladwell’s concept of stickiness. Like all beloved cult movies, it has endured and grown in stature but not all of its elements are as beloved or as sticky as the others. I’ve been writing about Al for six years now and I’m not sure I have ever encountered an Al fan who gushed about Victoria Jackson’s performance in UHF. But I’ve seen lots of super-fans for whom the film and album’s fake commercial for a kitchenware emporium called Spatula City is damn near sacred.
The idea of Spatula City, a somewhat guided commercial enterprise that’s able to cut out the middle-man by dealing only in spatulas, didn’t take hold in the psyches of “Weird Al” Yankovic fans despite being such a silly, goofball, ephemeral joke. No, it lodged itself in the minds of All super-fans specifically because it’s such a silly, goofball, ephemeral joke. Sometimes those are the best ones.
“Spatula City” is only the second skit in Al’s oeuvre, but if the form was novel the content and subject are quintessentially Al. The ineffable Alness of the song begins with a title that luxuriates in Al’s deep-seated love of words and wordplay in general and specific words and conceits in particular. In this case, that word is of course “Spatula”, an intriguingly Italian-sounding name for an appealingly random item.
Spatulas are useful of course but they’re useful in a limited way. They’re consummate supporting players of the kitchen universe so part of the absurdist humor in “Spatula City” comes from Al and his collaborators dramatically elevating the lowly spatula to a starring role in both a commercial and a very misguided, obsessive commercial enterprise. In Al and UHF’s spatula-crazed world, you pretty much only need spatulas. It’s not just the core of every well-stocked kitchen: it's the entirety of a well-stocked kitchen.
Sonically, “Spatula City” is completely deadpan. It’s narrated with a whiz-bam, “Get a load of this miracle product!” over-enthusiasm worthy of Al’s previous muse Ron Popeil. A confidently strolling baseline and jazzy drums (heavy on the hi-hat!) form a groovy musical bed for a hilariously over-the-top spiel for a uniquely useless business that takes specialization to comic extremes. In just over sixty-five seconds, the faux-commercial makes a number of dubious appeals for the titular business, depicting a “present” no one could possibly want as perfect both for Christmas (what child wouldn’t beam upon seeing a spatula-shaped wrapped package under the Christmas tree?) and as an expression of love.
Late in the beloved skit, “Sy Greenblatz” comes on and, in an exquisitely awkward, stilted tone of voice drones, “Hello, this is Sy Greenblatz, President of Spatula City. I liked the spatulas so much I bought the company.” Greenblatz is a parody of two iconically ridiculous figures ubiquitous on the airwaves of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Greenblatz is a parody of the Remington ad pitchman who famously crowed, “I liked the razor so much I bought the company.” But he also spoofs Sy Sperling, who rose to camp fame for wonderfully stilted commercials where he humble-bragged that he wasn’t just the President of Hair Club for Men, but also a client.
So there’s an element of pointed satire here to go along with the wonderful, wonderfully sticky weirdness of a giant store devoted solely to spatulas. In another context, it’d be just another random bit of silliness from a movie and a soundtrack with more than its share. Here, it’s a goddamned delight and a refreshing reminder that Al isn’t just funny and smart and semi-secretly satirical: he’s also weird in a most wonderful way.
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