Our long national nightmare of wedgies and social ostracism is finally over, and the weird have inherited the earth. “Weird Al” Yankovic’s new album Mandatory Fun has just debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200. This is the first time in Yankovic’s career that one of his albums has topped the Billboard charts, and the first comedy album to receive the honor since The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart hit No. 1 on July 25, 1960. Yankovic celebrated the news with a series of heartfelt tweets early this morning, thanking his fans for their years of support:
The rest of us can celebrate with Yankovic’s recent run of eight new music videos released over eight days, an enormously successful strategy that kept Mandatory Fun in the media all last week and has already racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube.