Fat.

It's been thirty years since Weird Al Yankovic released Even Worse, the album best known for its parody of Michael Jackson's song "Bad." And say what you want about Michael Jackson, he was comfortable enough to allow Al to do parodies of his songs, unlike Prince and George Michael, who refused. Jackson was a big fan of Al's. He may have also wanted the money that came from a hit parody royalties; Purina Giraffe Chow can run up quite the grocery bill, you know.

When you admire the work of a musician or band, you always tend to prefer the stuff that gets less airplay. You'll have heard the hits ten thousand times; your interest lies in the B-sides, the instrumental fillers, the stuff that never gets on the radio or in the supermarket. "Sure, 'I'm Too Sexy' is a great song," you'll say, with a little scoff insinuated, "but to get the real measure of Right Said Fred, you need to listen to their rendition of 'Cherry Cherry' or 'Fräulein Wunderbar.'" And then you wonder why you don't have any friends.

On that note, I've always preferred Al's original songs to his parodies. "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota," "Generic Blues," "One More Minute," "Nature Trail to Hell," and what should have charted as a country song, "Good Enough for Now," are among his many excellent songs. And I'd like to thank Basil of IMAO for reminding me of the James Tayloresque "You Don't Love Me Anymore," which, as the penultimate song on the album Off the Deep End, sets up a practical joke that totally got me.

Today, though, I'd like to mention "Fat," the big hit off the Even Worse album and a takeoff of Jackson's "Bad." Yep, this is the one with the fat suit video, where Al became Fat Alfred. Apparently it's tricky to dance in one of those things: "I would turn and the suit would turn like a half-second later," he said.

While the video is terrific, I always admired the way Al put this song together. The lyrics are outstanding in that they use a ton of fat jokes, some I didn't even know, and as a Family Size kid I knew a lot of them. By my count, in a song just over three and half minutes (with Jacksonian repeats and dance breaks) there are 16 fat zingers, not counting little bits of side business like "Ham on, ham on, ham on whole wheat, all right..."

You've got some fat classics there, like: "When I sit around the house, I really sit around the house" and "all by myself I'm a crowd" and "Down at the beach... I'm the only one who gets a tan." And there are less famous ones, like "My shadow weighs forty-two pounds" and "When you're only havin' seconds, I'm have twenty-thirds."

And then you have improved versions of classics. "Got more chins than a Chinese phone book" is made into the slicker (and rhymier) "The pavement cracks when I fall down / I've got more chins than Chinatown." "Too fat to see his feet" is not much of a joke, but "When I go to get my shoes shined I gotta take their word" is, and it rhymes with the previous line.

It's not as easy as it seems to write words to a melody that have proper rhythm, length, and emphasis. Lyricists are often dismissed as the "words guys," a practice that goes back at least to the opera, where the jamoke who writes the book is nobody while the man who composes the music is a titan. But it's hard to make words scan right to someone else's melody, and to do it while cramming in every joke you can is an achievement.

The best thing about it is that by using the same brag approach as Jackson's "Bad," it's the singer who is obese, and he's proud of it. "My zippers bust, my buckles break, I'm too much man for you to take"; "the whole world knows I'm fat and I'm proud, just tell me once again who's fat." If the song had been outwardly directed, ragging on someone for being obese, it would have been cruel.

So we salute Al today for the thirtieth anniversary of one of his greatest parodies. Personally, as a writer and editor, my all-time favorite Al parody has to be "Word Crimes" (awesome video below), but that's another story.