The Weird Accordion to Al Extended Version Excerpt: UHF

Al has a great line about how for music critics, his golden age is whenever they happened to be twelve years old. It’s a savvy observation that speaks to the role childhood nostalgia plays in how Al’s music is remembered. I was twelve years old in 1988 and while I’m not sure I would describe the album he released that year, Even Worse as my favorite, it was incontestably a year of profound significance during the most important decade of Al’s career because that was the magical annum when Al, manager/co-writer/director Jay Levey, and a ragtag gang of misfits traveled down to Tulsa to make a modestly budgeted comedy about television with the perversely dry title UHF. 

It was a huge professional milestone Al had been building towards his entire career. Orion, the gutsy studio behind such towering apogees of cinematic excellence as Amadeus, Platoon and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, was giving Al an opportunity to co-write and star in his own movie while still in his twenties. Having conquered the small screen, Al and Jay set their sights on the big screen. After all, if movies were good enough for Elvis, then they were good enough for Al. 

In UHF, Al plays George Newman, a Mad magazine Walter Mitty, an affable daydreamer on an endless losing streak whose mind is so colonized by macho pop culture that in his fantasies he is not himself, but instead a series of virile, larger-than-life men of action like Indiana Jones, Rambo and Rhett Butler. For George, drifting into other worlds brought to us through the tacky magic of Hollywood makes the crushing banality of everyday life bearable. 

UHF opens with a big set-piece that found Al slipping into the iconic garb of Indiana Jones, who loomed large the summer of UHF’s release thanks to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This lent the parody the same commercial element of timeliness as his parody singles. 

Al as Indy snags an Academy Award trophy and is then chased by a boulder across a huge swath of the globe in a matter of mere seconds, pursuing our hero from the Sphinx one moment to a snowy paradise the next. The daydream ends when Al receives the ultimate cartoon indignity: getting rolled over by a boulder that renders him completely flat.

George is such a no-hoper that even in his fantasies he ends up losing. When the fantasy dissolves into dreary reality, Al is experiencing his bleary final moments as an employee of Big Edna’s Burger World. 

George keeps getting fired from terrible jobs, but he has imagination, a quality the capitalist wasteland of UHF does not hold in high regard. When Big Edna hears George bad-mouthing her, she relieves George and his steadfast sidekick Bob (David Bowe) of their jobs and throws them so high and so far into the air that their trajectory can only be explained through cartoon physics. 

George lives next door to Kuni’s Karate Studio, the dojo of the titular Kuni (Gedde Watanabe). Kuni is a cheerful sadist who is forever punching or kicking his customers out of windows and through walls. Between Kuni karate-chopping his clients out of his studio and later nature host Raul throwing poodles out of windows to “teach” them to fly, UHF offers a treasure trove of defenestration-based comedy. The oddball employees of U62 are forever breaking the rules, particularly the ones involving not throwing people or animals out of windows. 

Casting an Asian actor as a martial artist is not the most progressive move, but it’s worth noting that Kuni is a confident, independent and ultimately heroic figure who strides purposefully through life, deriving great joy from deeming other people stupid. Kuni may be a caricature but we do not judge Kuni or laugh at him. Instead, Kuni judges us, and is forever enjoying a laugh at our expense. The filmmakers and actor Gedde Watanabe took a stock character and subverted it to create something strangely empowering. 

At home, George confidently places a hot dog inside a Twinkie and finishes the monstrosity off with Cheese Whiz, a Twinkie-wiener sandwich. Like so many elements of UHF, this culinary crime would catch on in a big way. It would develop a cult within a cult, a sort of sub-cult. 

It’s easy to see why. The Twinkie-wiener sandwich is a trash food Turducken of eatables that have been processed and packaged to the point where they no longer look or feel or even taste like food.

Then one fortunate day George’s rudderless existence as an unemployable slob gains direction when his cigar-chomping, degenerate gambler uncle Harvey (Stanley Brock) wins the deed to dilapidated, failing UHF channel 62 in a card game, and his wife Esther (Sue Ann Langdon) decides that running a TV station would be the perfect outlet for her nephew’s fertile imagination. 

Visiting the station with his sad-eyed girlfriend Terri (Victoria Jackson) for the first time under cover of night, George finds it’s a little slice of nothing in the middle of nowhere except for Philo (Anthony Geary), a soft-spoken mad scientist type who serves as the station’s chief engineer. 

For an employee of a rundown UHF station, Philo is a figure of vast, almost unlimited power. Philo fulfills many roles within the television station and world of UHF. He’s the chief engineer and, later, a science show host, but his most important role is as the movie’s Deus ex machina, a magic man who saves the day through illegal surveillance and then literally vanishes into thin air. 

In the studio’s wood paneled front office the next morning Al meets receptionist Pamela Finklestein (Fran Drescher). She begins the film a frustrated office worker whose dreams of breaking into news are doomed by a never-ending revolving door of bosses who never last more than a few weeks. 

The future The Nanny star’s intensely ethnic, unmistakably Jewish, incontrovertibly New York nasal bullhorn of a voice couldn’t be further from the conventional journalist ideal of a blandly handsome WASP with soothing Midwestern cadences, but in the wonderfully democratic world of UHF you do not need to fit the mold or look the part to do the job. 

This is particularly true of Fran’s eventual cameraman Noodles MacIntosh, who brings a whole new perspective to the job in that he’s played by legendary little person entertainer Billy Barty. Like Pamela, Noodles is good at what he does, as I imagine his work is full of dynamic, Citizen Kane-style low angle shots. UHF gives the little guy his due literally as well as metaphorically. 

UHF’s breakout star, Michael Richards’ Stanley Spadowski, isn’t just good at being a janitor; he’s pathologically devoted to the gig. Pushing a mop isn’t just something he does: it’s who he is. 

We meet Stanley when he is called into the office of R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy) and falsely accused of misplacing an important file. The joy McCarthy takes in being bad is palpable and infectious. He’s liberated by the role and the opportunity to play in this sandbox with this gang of idiots. 

A great slobs-versus-snobs comedy requires a great snob. UHF has a hiss-worthy villain for the ages in McCarthy and Fletcher. McCarthy is best known as the protagonist of 1957’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he was also a founding member of the Actor’s Studio, a proud member of Joe Dante’s repertory company, and an Oscar nominee for playing Biff Loman in 1951’s Death of a Salesman.

In the process, McCarthy proved himself worthy of playing a bad guy in a “Weird Al” Yankovic movie. McCarthy brings a wealth of experience and training with the finest acting teachers of the twentieth century to calling people “irresponsible pus-brains,” “pea-brained yokels,” and “sniveling maggots.” 

Fletcher treats his employees like his family. He hates his family almost as much as he hates George, who stops by his station to drop off mis-delivered mail and instantly earns the white-haired misanthrope’s hatred.

As a cinematic slob, Stanley is the natural enemy of the Snobicus Domesticus, a loathsome breed R.J. indisputably epitomizes. After R.J. fires him in a fit of rage, Stanley finds himself without a job. Even more importantly, he finds himself without a mop after his former employers sadistically take it. 

Stanley was given his mop on his eighth birthday, but it’s more than just a beloved keepsake from his childhood. Stanley’s mop is his best friend. It’s his constant companion. It’s the source of his power. Tearing Stanley away from his mop by force is as cruel as angrily removing a baby from his mother’s teat. 

George takes pity on Stanley, a strange, simian creature who seems simultaneously fearless and inexplicably terrified by everyone and everything he encounters, including his own shadow.

In an accidental stroke of genius, George offers Stanley a job working at U62 pushing a brand new mop. In an additional burst of inspiration, George decides to augment boring, expensive re-runs with original programming. 

Before Stanley’s emergence as the station’s breakout star, Al holds down the kiddie host position as Uncle Nutsy, a walking nightmare in plaid and polyester with a decidedly bipolar approach to his job. He’s either flailing about wildly as if in a manic state of delirium or he’s crashing emotionally.

The children in Uncle Nutsy’s mostly empty audience look as if they are there against their will, as a form of punishment. Uncle Nutsy’s Clubhouse captures the casual sadism and low-budget surreality of local children’s shows, with their sad, persistent air of desperation, failure and humiliation. 

Uncle Nutsy’s Clubhouse is a pit of human misery. The kids look suicidal. Uncle Nutsy abuses sidekick Bobbo the Clown (Bob in clown garb) with impunity. Happiness has no place on the set of Uncle Nutsy’s Clubhouse or in the hearts of its audience and cast. 

UHF is deeply influenced by Al’s love of the genre parodies of the Zucker Brothers, the slapstick, gag-a-second team behind Al’s all-time favorite film Top Secret! in its gloriously deadpan cinematic spoofs. Its format owes an unmistakable debt to the Zucker Brothers-written, John Landis-directed, Robert K. Weiss-produced 1976 sketch comedy breakthrough Kentucky Fried Movie. 

Yankovic’s starring debut is a narrative film with a sketch comedy soul. Presenting the film’s action as both the behind-the-scenes shenanigans and onscreen programming of a rundown TV station gives the filmmakers the freedom to continually forget plot and story for long stretches for the sake of daydreams/movie parodies, fake commercials and, due to the nature of Al’s fame, the “Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies” music video. 

UHF’s indifference to plot helped give us stand-alone treasures like the “Spatula City” commercial, a retro wonder about a magical consumer paradise called Spatula City where, in the immortal, endlessly quoted words of its ear-worm jingle, “We sell spatulas, and that's all!” 

In the commercial’s oddly appealing alternate universe, every milestone and holiday is celebrated with the ritualistic giving of spatulas, which are no longer a mundane reality of the average kitchen, but rather, a source of joy. It’s like Beatlemania all over again, with the fab four replaced by a previously unheralded kitchen tool used to make omelettes. 

“Spatula City” is like the Twinkie wiener-dog in that it developed a micro-cult, a cult within a cult. Three decades after UHF’s theatrical release, its thirtieth anniversary was more widely celebrated than similar milestones for movies that made fifty times as much at the box-office. The big year included an officially licensed line of tee-shirts from Fright Rags that included a spiffy Spatula City number that sold out very quickly. 

“Spatula City” made Al synonymous with flapjack flippers. That is a whole new level of fame. To be associated forever in the public mind with a popular kitchen utensil is something the Justin Biebers of the world can only dream about.

Fright Rags’ collection of sold-out UHF tee-shirts includes one commemorating Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, which owes its station-saving existence to George, who grows so dispirited by his lot in life that he sulks gloomily out of Uncle Nutsy’s Clubhouse in the middle of a taping and casually gives his show to Stanley.

“Hey Stanley, how would you like your own TV show?” George asks Stanley, words performers wait to hear their entire careers, but which George dispenses with all of the weight of someone asking a co-worker if they want a last slice of birthday cake before it’s thrown away. 

Stanley accepts just as nonchalantly. In the process the station is saved and both men’s lives are changed forever. 

While teetotaler George goes to the bar with Bob to take up drinking, Stanley becomes a word-of-mouth sensation for adults as well as children, scuzzy barflies and innocent tots alike. 

George’s recently abandoned television program becomes an instant pop culture sensation that essentially goes viral in a pre-viral world as children of all ages gather around television’s glowing, magical light to watch Stanley do his thing. 

UHF would prove to be weirdly prescient in myriad ways, from the way its homemade programming anticipates the zero-budget, DIY aesthetic of YouTube to its conviction that people would gather en masse around television screens to watch Michael Richards.

Yankovic’s gift to cult cinema is predicated on Stanley being so bizarrely charismatic that audiences wouldn’t be able to take their eyes off him despite the character having no business being on television. They lucked out in casting an actor who possessed the talent and cracked magnetism to become a widely beloved cult television god in real life as well. 

One of cinema’s great idiot savants, Stanley Spadowski is a bug-eyed, horse-toothed Howard Beale. He’s a manic Chauncey Gardner with a mop. He’s Reverend Jim with a little Jerry Lewis thrown in. He’s a close cousin of Bill Murray’s groundskeeper in Caddyshack, who was similarly tuned into a frequency detectable only by madmen and geniuses. But he’s never anything other than Michael Richards and Stanley Spadowski. All these disparate influences add up to something wholly original. 

There is a purity to Stanley, an innocence and vulnerability that reminded me of Richards’ Fridays nemesis Andy Kaufman, who also worked a low-paying job pushing around a mop as a busboy at Jerry’s Famous Deli at the height of his Taxi fame. Despite making a fortune as a TV star, Kaufman chose to make minimum wage for menial physical labor. Kaufman was just plain weird, the way Stanley is here. 

Stanley is too sweet for this cruel world. Stanley Spadowski is such a beloved and iconic character that he quickly took on a life of his own separate from the actor who played him. Re-watching UHF, I did not feel like I was watching troubled comedian Michael Richards playing a role, I felt like I was watching Stanley Spadowski. That’s how thoroughly Richards invests himself in the role. Richards paradoxically pours so much of his heart and soul and artistry into his two great, enduring creations, Stanley Spadowski and Cosmo Kramer, that he becomes them on a cellular, soul-deep level. Because they are so real, we can enjoy these magnificent creations despite the unfortunate shadow of Richards’ real-life infamy. 

It was Richards, after all, who said those horrible, regrettable things; Stanley’s heart and soul are as pure as his love for his mop.

At first having no experience and not knowing what he’s doing prove formidable impediments to success for George until he reaches a blissful point where having no experience and not knowing what he’s doing become huge strengths. If you don’t know that you’re supposed to fail because you never had a chance in the first place, then you might just end up succeeding, which is what happens to George and his homegrown empire of wackiness.

The success of Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse inspires George to create more original programming showcasing random people in his life, like the Kuni-hosted game show Wheel of Fish, which is equal parts sadistic and absurdist, and the Philo-fronted Secrets of the Universe, where viewers learn to make plutonium from household items. 

U62 is such a bizarre free-for-all that one of its more alarming programs, Raul’s Wild Kingdom, seems to have slipped onto the air by accident. The gloriously unhinged nature show spoof finds the enthusiastic and clearly insane Raul (Trinidad Silva) dispensing dangerous factoids like “the turtle is also nature’s suction cup” and gingerly tossing terrified poodles out of windows under a deeply unfortunate conviction that they can fly. Silva was killed by a drunk driver during the filming of UHF before his role was finished shooting, but the lunatic conviction and irrepressible energy he brings to the role make an indelible impression in a very short amount of screen time. 

When U62 starts to make a name for itself, R.J. Fletcher derides the competition as nothing but “a bunch of punks broadcasting out of a closet.” The station is punk in the same way that The Dr. Demento Show and Al’s first singles and album are punk. In this wonderful world, it’s all about energy, attitude and personality instead of polish or professionalism. It’s about self-expression, not chasing the approval of cultural gate-keepers. It’s about sticking it to the man instead of playing by his rules. The inmates are running the asylum and recreating it in their own idiosyncratic image. 

It’s the triumph of the underdog. It’s a plucky television David slaying the belligerent Goliath of R.J.’s network affiliate. This connection between the audio funhouse of The Dr. Demento Show and the movie’s radically inclusive, democratic vision of survival of the zaniest is driven home by Dr. Demento’s cameo as a member of Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse’s studio audience. 

As its popularity explodes, the Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse set increases in size and sophistication. Soon the TV sensation is driving onto the set in a car to the upbeat synthesizers of “Fun Zone,” a snazzy tune that began life as a discarded theme to the failed sketch comedy pilot Welcome to the Fun Zone before being re-purposed as the theme music for Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse. 

But the instrumental has an even greater claim to fame in that it has opened Al’s concerts for decades now. For fans, hearing those opening notes induces Pavlovian shivers of excitement because they can’t help but connect you to the communal joy of both a “Weird Al” Yankovic concert and a UHF theatrical viewing.

On the strength of Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, U62 rockets to number one in the ratings but mo’ ratings bring mo’ problems when, in a narratively convenient development, Uncle Harvey ends up owing 75,000 dollars to the mob, leading him to agree to sell the station to R.J. unless George is able to raise that sum by Friday at ten o’clock. 

That is not a premise that holds up to scrutiny, but it does not have to. UHF is not about plot or plausibility or realism. As a shining example of the 1980s slobs-versus-snobs comedy, UHF has a right, no, an obligation to include a plot point as wonderfully cheesy as a marathon telethon to raise the money necessary to save the station before the bad guy takes over and turns everyone’s dreams into ash. 

R.J. isn’t about to play fair, so he dispatches goons, led by David Proval of The Sopranos, to kidnap Stanley and keep him off the air long enough for the telethon to fail to reach what, frankly, seems like an absurdly modest goal given the station’s incredible heat and popularity. 

Stanley’s natural exuberance drives the men cursed with babysitting him to a state of homicidal rage. One of the trickiest feats to pull off in comedy is being irritating and entertaining simultaneously. Generally when funnymen and women attempt that balancing act they succeed at being annoying and fail at being funny. 

Richards pulls off that miraculous stunt here however. Even more remarkably, he’s likable as well as irritating and entertaining, an emotionally stunted man-child who is good to his friend George and good to his mop and loved and embraced by children because he is so obviously just a big, goofy overgrown child himself. 

A glowering George transforms into Rambo through the magic of imagination and day-dreaming in order to save Stanley from the bad guys’ clutches, leaving a trail of imaginary devastation in his wake.

Then the fake muscles disappear and he turns back into George just as Kuni and his karate commandos appear out of nowhere and liberate our heroes in time for them to race over to the station as the telethon draws to a close and the deadline approaches. 

Thankfully, Philo has been acting as a one-man NSA by stashing secret video cameras around town. The eccentric scientist’s illegal surveillance of R.J. pays off when he tapes him disparaging his viewers and community, then plays it over the airwaves in an equally unlawful endeavor. 

The station’s unlikely salvation comes when a gentleman everyone assumes is homeless because of his bedraggled appearance buys the final 2000 shares in UHF that allow the station to hit its goal and survive as a community-owned, community-minded independent station, ironically using money he made selling a rare penny R.J. accidentally gave him as a display of contempt. 

Like Comedy Bang! Bang! and The Weird Al Show, UHF is Sneak Science Fiction. From the outside, nothing about these movies and television shows explicitly states, or even vaguely suggests, that they will veer into science fiction and fantasy. Yet, that does not prevent them from dabbling in thematic elements like space-aliens, time-travel and human cloning for the sake of a gag.

From the beginning, something is very different about Philo. He seems to be inhabiting a different reality than the other characters for reasons that eventually become clear. It’s as if Geary and Philo aren’t really in UHF. Instead, they’re merely visiting, just as Philo is only temporarily adopting human form so that he can achieve the great cosmic good of assisting the earth-slobs in their heroic eternal struggle against the earth-snobs. 

Mission accomplished, Philo assumes his true form, a three-eyed space alien from the planet Zarkon rendered in the kind of meticulous and detailed stop-motion animation that legitimately feels like a miracle as much as a glorious, labor-intensive fusion of art and technology. Philo was realized by the Chiodo Brothers, the legends behind Killer Klowns From Outer Space and, in a sequence that occupies an outsized place in the imagination of my generation: the reveal of Large Marge’s monstrous true form in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. 

Watching the Chiodos’ artisanal magic I felt the same sense of child-like wonder I did watching Burton’s masterpiece for the first time. And subsequent fifteen times. 

Like Al’s music, UHF has endured in no small part because of the way its sadism and pervasive, even perverse morbidity undercuts its family-friendly, inclusive wholesomeness. Al has never sworn on an album but UHF earns its PG-13 with slapstick violence that is no less striking for being cartoonish. 

Terrible things happen to people and animals and limbs in UHF. Before a sweaty bad guy can shoot him, Al as Indy whips his arm completely off. Conan the Librarian chops a man clean in half. An absent-minded shop teacher played by Emo Philips loses his concentration and his thumb in rapid succession. A lunatic named Raul hosts an animal show that is less a conventional nature program than an animal snuff film. Car salesman Crazy Eddie lives up to his name by promising the audience that if he does not sell a car within the next hour “I’m gonna club this baby seal.” Grinning with misplaced pride, he threatens, “That’s right! I’m gonna club a seal to make a better deal.”

Al has illustrated through his music that it is possible to be clean and funny at the same time, but UHF’s pervasive core of darkness and willingness, even eagerness to go too far for a laugh is a huge part of what makes it legitimately, laugh-out-loud funny, in spite of what Roger Ebert angrily insisted in his UHF review. 

Roger Ebert opens his one-star evisceration of UHF by conceding, with a tart combination of faux-generosity and genuine meanness, “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.”

Ebert seemingly channeled R.J. Fletcher when he cast Old Testament judgment on Al’s lovable comedy about a bunch of amiable goofs with brutal lines like, “Those who laugh at UHF should inspire our admiration; in these dreary times we must treasure the easily amused.”

Ebert was being unnecessarily cruel when he speculated abstractly about an audience for UHF theoretically existing, and showing the film more generosity than he was capable of mustering for a silly romp he seemingly viewed as a personal affront.

The thirteen-year-old me was one of those someones in the theater laughing regularly and loudly, but there just weren’t enough of us true believers hitting the theater opening weekend to keep UHF from flopping. 

1989 was not kind to UHF. It must have felt like Al was getting a big thumbs down from the universe itself. Thankfully history has been infinitely kinder to UHF than the era that birthed it. UHF’s theatrical tag-line quipped, “Television the way it was meant to be seen: in a movie theater,” but it turns out that UHF’s audience was waiting patiently to see Al’s movie about TV where it was actually meant to be seen: on television and computer screens. 

The UHF-loving audience Ebert wrote about as an abstraction turned out to not only exist, but to be more passionate and loyal than anyone could have imagined. Cultists don’t just like UHF: They embrace it with their whole soul. They show it to their children. They buy the collector’s 25th anniversary edition Blu-Ray and quote it and purchase Spatula City tee-shirts decades after the movie stiffed at the box office and was written off as the simultaneous beginning and ending of Al’s career as movie star. 

Over three decades after this ridiculous movie came and went from theaters without much notice, at least of the positive variety, it’s remarkable how many people believe deeply in Al’s ridiculous movie, but then UHF is a silly comedy worth believing in. 

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