I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.