‘Weird Al’ Succeeds Kid Cudi as ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ Bandleader
“Weird Al” Yankovic has signed on as the new bandleader/co-host of Comedy Bang! Bang!, Scott Aukerman‘s absurdist IFC talk show. The parody master will follow rapper Kid Cudi, who held the position for 20 episodes, and musical improv-comic Reggie Watts (now James Corden’s side-kick at The Late Late Show), who appeared in the first 70 episodes.
“If you would have told me, when I was a teenager, listening and laughing along to Al’s In 3-D album, that one day I would partner up with him, I would have asked who you were and how you got in my room. Then I would have politely shown you the door. Because that’s how I was raised,” Aukerman said in a statement.
Production is underway for the show’s upcoming fifth season, which will air 20 half-hour episodes starting this spring. Yankovic made five Bang! Bang! appearances since the program’s 2012 debut, most recently as the featured guest on the aptly titled 2015 episode “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Wears a Different Hawaiian Shirt.” Comedy Bang! Bang! marks the comic musician’s first weekly TV series role since The Weird Al Show in 1997.
Yankovic’s most recent LP, 2014’s Mandatory Fun, includes parodies of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” Lorde’s “Royals,” Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.” The album, his 14th overall, won Best Comedy Album at the 2015 Grammys.
“It never gets old,” Yankovic said during his acceptance speech. “For the first week after I’ve won a Grammy, I have it fixed to my forehead with woodscrews, like a Grammy unicorn. Then I take it off and put it on a shelf somewhere.”