AVC: There's also a racist portrayal of a Japanese man in that parody. How does that relate to you?
WAY: [Laughs.] I don't do any racist humor that I'm aware of, but I guess in order to make their parody funnier, they took some creative license.
AVC: How much of a sense of humor do you have about people parodying you?
WAY: Well, I don't really live in a glass house. I can't get too offended when somebody parodies me. I think it was pretty cool. I'm a big fan of Bob Odenkirk. I think he's very funny, and I was honored to be part of Mr. Show, in an oblique bleak way. I think it was one of the great TV series of all time.
AVC: What did you say when you e-mailed him?
WAY: Oh, I forget exactly. Just something to the effect of, "I loved your Daffy 'Mal' Yinkleyankle impersonation." [Laughs.] I'm not sure if he even responded. But I've bumped into Bob many times over the years. In fact, he wasn't one of the writers of my Saturday-morning TV show, but he was in on the first kind of conceptual—he was part of the think tank where we were generating ideas for the original pilot. So I actually got to work with Bob way back when. I think it's pretty obvious I admire and appreciate his work, and I certainly was not offended by the caricature.
AVC: Have you had any contact with Michael Richards since his incident last year?
WAY: I haven't seen him in person. We've exchanged a few e-mails, mostly not talking about the event. I think I wished him happy birthday once or twice. [Laughs.] Probably the less said the better.
AVC: The number 27 pops up a lot in your lyrics and artwork. What's the significance? Or is it just a coincidence?
WAY: The real story is, it was just a number that I happened to use a couple times in song lyrics, or maybe in a music video, without even thinking about. I guess maybe it was the right number of syllables, or at the time I thought it was a funny number, or it happened to rhyme just the right way. [Laughs.] So there was no real thought given to it. But then a few fans picked up on it and said, "Oh, Al used the number 27 like three times. This must have some kind of significance." As soon I realized that they were fetishizing this, I started doing it on purpose. I started making sure there was at least one number 27 in the lyrics on an album, or incorporated in the artwork, or making sure the video had the number 27. It became a whole cult-like attraction. [Laughs.] People have hypothesized what the number means, or the significance, but that's the honest story. It's just a number I started using that people started attaching a lot of importance to.
AVC: Several rock stars have died at age 27.
WAY: That's true as well. It's also three cubed. [Laughs.] There's a number of theories floating around, but they're all pretty much false.
AVC: Do you get sick of people asking when you'll start doing serious music?
WAY: I get asked that a lot, and I don't quite understand why I get that question so much. People never ask people doing serious music, "Do you ever think about doing funny music?" My stock answer to that is, I enjoy doing the kind of music I do. I think there's enough people in the world already that do serious music. Sometimes I get, "Have you ever thought about doing real music?" I like to think the music I do is real, it just happens to be funny.
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