Weird Al, Lady Gaga, and Twitter Actually Being Used for Good

2011 was a much simpler time.

Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Sorry if my voice is a bit hoarse, I’ve been singing along to songs for several hours.

Photo via Super Festivals

When Weird Al parodied Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” in 2011, he donated all proceeds from the song and video to the Human Rights Campaign.

My buddy Rob and I saw Weird Al Yankovic live on his “Bigger and Weirder” tour last night. Both of us have been fans from a young age—I remember regularly watching the movie UHF on VHS and being tickled by goofy bits like Spatula City and Wheel of Fish.

Even as an adult, I still get down with jams like “Word Crimes,” which includes several great grammar refreshers, or “A Complicated Song,” a parody of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” that, as the title suggests, boasts a handful of complex situations. Plus, it’s got fantastic rhyming schemes. How often do you get a song that rhymes “decapitated” with “really hate it” and “Sports Illustrated?”

His live show is FANTASTIC, by the way. This tour has expanded his classic OG band (who he’s performed with for over 40 years) with additional backup singers and instrumentalists, and it is just delightful. You get costume changes, crowd interaction, video breaks—I’m particularly fond of Al inserting himself into that famous scene from Whiplash—and dance choreography worthy of Broadway musicals. Highly recommend.

One song he did not play during our show was “Perform This Way,” the lead single from his 2011 Alpocalypse and a parody of the song “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga.

As the story goes, Weird Al, who likes to get permission from the original artist before releasing a parody, intended for “Perform This Way” to be an homage to Lady Gaga herself, with all of her majestic outfits and flair for putting on a great show.

He sent the request to her team, and they asked to see the lyrics. When he sent those, they wanted to hear a recorded version of the song. Al had to cut short a family vacation to go record, shared it with Lady Gaga’s manager, and was told she had rejected the song.

Al, understandably, was panicked. This was going to be the first single of his record, and now he might have to delay the entire album as he wrote and recorded a new track.

He released his parody on YouTube on April 20, 2011, and word quickly spread among fans on Twitter. News of the viral song made its way to Lady Gaga, who immediately shot down the claims that she had refused the parody.

Sources close to Gaga said she hadn’t, in fact, heard the song, and was “a huge Weird Al fan.”

Once the misunderstanding was straightened out, Lady Gaga gave her A-OK, the song remained on Alpocalypse, and all was right with the world.

“Twitter saved my album,” Yankovic told Wired. “I’m just thankful people cared enough to help me out.”

Yankovic also explained that he was planning to donate proceeds from the song and video to the Human Rights Campaign.

“That was always my intention for the single and the video to donate my proceeds to the Human Rights Campaign. You know, I try not to do parodies that are in bad taste and the fact that ‘Born This Way’ was a gay rights anthem, I just felt a little strange poking fun at it. There's something a little wrong about that. The way I could justify it personally was by donating my proceeds.”

Let this serve as a good reminder that sometimes misunderstandings happen in life. We could all offer each other a little more grace.

Watch “Perform This Way” below and be awed by Weird Al’s flexibility! (Or, you know, the flexibility of the body double helping him out with this video.)