The King of Song Parodies is now the King of Pop — at least for a week.
“Weird” Al Yankovic charted his first No. 1 album as his latest satirical disc, “Mandatory Fun,” sold just over 104,000, according to Nielsen/SoundScan. That gave him the win over Jason Mraz, whose new album, “Yes!” sold under 84,000 copies.
Yankovic’s work is the first comedy disc to hit Billboard’s No. 1 spot since Allan Sherman’s “My Son, the Nut” all the way back in 1963.
“Even the notion of it happening nearly caused my head to expode,” Yankovic told The News. “I never thought it was an option for me as someone making comedy albums.”
It took over three decades for the jokester to sit atop the charts, though, in fact, Yankovic sold far more discs in the 1980s, when he racked up four gold and six platinum discs for works filled with hits like “Eat It” (his send-up of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”) and “Ricky” (a rank on Toni Basil’s smash “Mickey”).
He only cracked the Billboard Top 10 in the last few years because of a music market that’s far depressed compared to the industry’s golden age. Number 1 may still be a big deal … but it’s not nearly as big as it once was.
Even so, the 54-year-old star’s big score shows an unusually smart adaptation to today’s changing marketplace. For an eight-day period earlier this month, Yankovic released a video online every day, turning the nerdy star into a viral internet constant.
The exposure Yankovic earned via mobile and social networks leapt an astounding 3,391% between the week of July 7 and July 14.
Yankovic’s video-play in that period obliterated not just Mraz but every other major music star, according to the company Kontera, which analyzes web traffic. Last week, Yankovic’s closest competition was Beyonce (consider those words for a second!) — yet Queen Bey had roughly half as much exposure as the satirist. Yankovic also dwarfed the viral play of stars as big as Justin Timberlake and Jay Z in the last week.
The comic said he made the decision to put out 8 videos in a row because, “the way it works today is that clips go viral for a day, and then everyone says ‘so,what’s next?’ I thought, this way we have something new everyday.”
The risk, he says, is that “people could say, ‘oh no, not another Weird Al video. But instead it snowballed.”
Yankovic received no record company money to fund his cheeky clips. Instead he cajoled the funds from on-line brands like Funny or Die, Yahoo, and College Humor, which then played the clips non-stop, helping spread them to social media accounts around the country. “They got the content, generating millions of clicks, and I got the videos,” Yankovic says.
Of the eight clips, the most viewed, according to Kontera, was Yankovic’s rank on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (turned into “Word Crimes”), followed by his parody of Pharrell’s “Happy” (“Tacky”), Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (“Handy”), and Lorde’s “Royals” (redone as a wry take on aluminum called “Foil”).
The California-born, accordian-playing Yankovic got his break as a teenager, creating parody songs for the syndicated comedy show run by Dr. Demento. He first earned national attention for his snarky take on The Knack’s 1979 hit, “My Sharona” (overhauled as “My Bologna”).
Yankovic’s last album, “Alpocalypse” from 2011, opened at No. 9, with less than half the sales of his new “Fun.”
jfarber@nydailynews.com
