"The more serious that an artist takes themselves, the easier it is to lampoon them, because it doesn’t take much to pop the bubble of pretentiousness."

"And thankfully [Nirvana had] a good sense of humor about it, too. But there are some songs that people are just, like, waiting for the Weird Al treatment: 'Oh, Al’s going to step in and, like, take this down a peg.'... [S]ometimes my parody didn’t work so well, because I was parodying something that was already perceived as not all that serious.... Most artists in pop culture are very serious.... But I always like to make sure that the artist and songwriters feel respected."

Said Weird Al, quoted in "How Weird Al Spoofed Himself/In a new bio-pic, the singer applies his talents to a surprising subject: his own rise to stardom" (The New Yorker).

Al reveals that the reason Daniel Radcliffe was chosen to play the lead in the bio-pic is that he'd done this...

 

"And the fact that he wanted to memorize that—that means automatically he’s a huge nerd, just like me. I memorized the 'Elements' song and performed it in college at coffeehouses. And the fact that he did that, and did it on national TV, in front of, like, Rihanna and Colin Farrell—I thought, O.K., this guy’s a kindred spirit."

It was funny running across that, because we were just talking about the "Elements" song in the comments to this post 3 days ago quoting Dylan saying "one might as well write about the periodic table of elements with built-in rhymes about calcium, chromium and lithium." 

Another cool revelation from Al: "You know, for what it’s worth, Madonna, back in 1985, before my parody came out, told a friend of hers, 'Oh, I wonder when Weird Al’s going to do "Like a Surgeon,"' and her friend happened to know my manager. So word got back to me. And I thought, Oh, not a bad idea. I guess I will. So the idea actually came from her."