The Big Squeeze Day Eighty-Seven: "She Never Told Me She Was a Mime" from Alapalooza

The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with three primary 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 80 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. Third, I want to promote the Weird A-Coloring to Al “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I am doing with Felipe as well as its hardcover, full-color signed and numbered limited edition version, which you can pre-order here

Author’s Commentary:  I am very excited to talk to my pals over at the Beer'd Al podcast as my first big podcast appearance for The Weird A-Coloring to Al because it’s always a pleasure and a privilege talking to people who can have an intelligent, informed, even cerebral conversation about songs like “Gotta Boogie” and “Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung.”

Everyone knows “Weird Al” Yankovic. EVERYONE. And most folks know the hits as well as songs that somehow never cracked the top 40 yet take up enormous cultural space all the same, like “Jurassic Park”, “The Saga Begins” and “Amish Paradise” (peaked at 46, astonishingly). But there is something wonderful about geeking out with fellow “Weird Al” Yankovic obsessives about the songs seemingly NOBODY knows other than the hardest of the hardcore.

I’m talking songs like “Party in the Leper Colony”, “I Wanna Be Your Hog” and of course “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime.” THAT was part of the appeal of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour: the opportunity to hear songs you never thought you’d hear Al perform live, partially on account of you suspect that he may be ashamed of them, on account of being songs with names and premises like "Party in the Leper Colony” and “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” and partially because they were egregiously silly obscurities at the time of their release and have only gotten more obscure with time.

Just as Phish fans freak out with joy when the band plays a song it almost never plays, Al fans like myself lost their fucking shit when Al and the band launched into “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” or “Stuck in a Closet With Vanna White.”

If you’re reading this profoundly self-indulgent column built upon the foundation of self-indulgent column you know what I’m talking about and if you don’t, I don’t want to hear it.

Original article: 

It’s a testament to what a beloved figure American pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic is that he’s managed to remain one of our most respected and enduring pop icons despite writing and releasing songs with the titles “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” and “Party at the Leper Colony.”

Al even controversially claimed that people “love “Eat It” so much that I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose a single fan.” Yes, being the most successful person in the world at what you do, as Al is, will give you confidence. It takes audacity to bring into this sick, sad decaying world of ours a composition called “She Never Told Me That She Was a Mime” because the song violates a number of sacrosanct comedy rules simultaneously and egregiously. 

First and foremost: never lower yourself to dealing with mimes on any level, but particularly on a comic, jokey one. Forget Gilligan’s Island or Spam, the meat that comes in a can: jokes about mimes, and people not enjoying the artistry and craft of mime, is the definition of hack subject matter. The only thing comic sophisticates (and let’s be real here, we would not be reading or writing about “Weird Al” Yankovic this obsessively and exhaustively unless we were all, every last one of us, comic sophisticates) abhor as much as jokes about mimes (or mimes, for that matter) is wordplay. Wordplay about mimes that doubles as a particularly corny dad joke? My goodness, “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” is a veritable perfect storm of comedy-killers (that is to say killers of comedy, not comedy that kills). 

And yet. And yet. Here’s the thing: I’ve discovered over the course of this project, the Weird Accordion to Al, that I really like this “Weird Al” Yankovic guy. I would definitely describe myself a “fan.” Even though his stuff is sometimes really silly, he’s actually really smart and funny and he’s got some really great tunes. 

And I know what you’re probably thinking: isn’t his stuff pretty much for kids? No! Not at all. A lot of his music actually works on a couple of different levels, a lot of them really smart. So even when he writes a song with a name and premise like “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” he has a way of making you laugh in spite of yourself, not unlike mimes do when they tickle the funny bones of would-be “haters” with classic routines like the one where they pretend that they’re stuck in a wind tunnel. 

“She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” is another Al tale of a romantic relationship bedeviled by a fatal flaw of the comical variety. In this case, things start off “perfectly normal” before our singer notices some alarming changes in his partner, namely that she’s wearing white make-up and a black leotard. 

Things escalate quickly from there. In our crooner’s eyes, this is no mere mild eccentricity or regrettable hobby. No, for him it is nothing short of a “horrible secret” that has made his life “a living hell.” Then comes the exquisitely cornball wordplay of the title. If the song’s chorus doesn’t make you roll your eyes so hard that they pop out of their sockets and fall to the floor, then you are not human. And if they do, I'm still not sure you're human, cause that'd be pretty weird, almost like the kind of thing you'd only see in a cartoon. 

But I’m a cornball enough human being to concede that when I saw the song’s name for the first time, I groaned audibly and rolled my eyes but then I kind of chuckled inside ever so slightly, just as I did when the understandably peeved narrator complains his misguided, mute amour is “acting like she’s trapped inside a big glass box all the time.” 

Though it’s not a rhyme of Cole Porter-like sophistication, I similarly love the Yiddish-flavored aggression of the singer complaining of the titular human irritant, “Now she makes everybody sick/Doin' that pantomime shtick”, even if I’m not entirely sure whether I was laughing at, or with the song, or if the distinction between the two even matters. 

In the end, Al survived “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” to become an enduring American icon and while this may not be Al’s best, or most sophisticated, or most important work, it could very well be his silliest, and for a man with a song called “Gotta Boogie” to his name, that’s no small feat. 

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