Songfacts®:

• Weird Al Yankovic is known for being a nice guy, but even he has his not-so-nice moments, which are amplified in this song about a callous character who complains how other people's tragedies are inconvenient for him.
  
  "Not a real laugh-out-loud kind of song," Yankovic admitted to AV Club in 2011. "Another very, very dark song, and that came from the place of every now and then I would have these moments - I like to think I'm a pretty nice guy, but I have these moments where I, in my own head at least, I show an astounding lack of empathy.
  
  Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you’ll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to The Flintstones?' And there'll be a horrible car accident, and all you can think of is how you're going to be late to work, and these are real moments where I find myself being horrified by my own brain, having so little empathy for other people."
• As the song unfolds, the self-absorbed man's uncompassionate thoughts start affecting his actions, to the point where he stabs his boss in the face and complains that his knife is probably damaged.
  
  "I kind of amp it up, and every verse is worse than the last, and by the end the guy's just a full-on monster," Yankovic continued in his AV Club interview. "But you know - I don't think I've mentioned this before - I wrote this song before 9/11 just because I felt a lot of that selfishness in our culture, and immediately after 9/11 it felt like our national attitude had changed, and everyone was pitching in and being helpful, and being supporting and loving, which lasted about a week. [Laughs]
  
  But at that point I thought my song was obsolete. I thought, 'Well, this is not the way people are behaving anymore. We've become this loving utopia.' Well, like I said, that didn't last a very long period of time, and now we're back to our own selfish ways again."
• Yankovic sings this in the style of alt-rocker Ben Folds, who plays piano on the track. But Yankovic didn't make it easy on him.
  
  "Ben and I are old friends at this point, and of course I sought his keyboard work for that song. So he came in and knocked it out. I think that's an F-Sharp, so he was kind of mad at me for that," he laughed. "Not a very keyboard-friendly key."
• Poodle Hat, Yankovic's 11th studio album, lampoons musical styles of the early 2000s. At the time, Ben Folds was a newly solo artist after the breakup of his band, Ben Folds Five. He released his first solo album, Rockin' The Suburbs, in 2001, and enlisted Yankovic to direct and appear in the music video for the title track.