Parody singer Weird Al Yankovic isn't just a funnyman. He's also a risk-taker.

His current single, "The Saga Begins," which lampoons the plot of "Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace," would seem to be a sure-fire 1999 hit, but Yankovic went out on a comedic limb by setting it to the music of Don McLean's "American Pie"

(RealAudio excerpt), a song that's older than much of Yankovic's target audience.

"It was kind of taking a chance, or running with scissors, to coin a phrase," Yankovic said from his Los Angeles home Wednesday. " 'American Pie' is a 30-year-old song, and I thought I would at least be limiting the demographic that would be interested in the parody. But kids seem to be taking to it regardless of whether they know the original song."

"The Saga Begins" (RealAudio excerpt) helped the veteran parodist, whose hits have included "Eat It" and "Like a Surgeon," generate his highest-ever single-week album sales two weeks ago, when Running With Scissors sold 72,310 copies. That total boosted it to the #16 position on the Billboard 200 albums chart. This week the album, Yankovic's 10th, dropped to #29.

"It's very gratifying that after all these years, people aren't sick of me yet," said the 39-year-old Yankovic, who recently launched a U.S. tour that will last through the end of the year.

"I never really know how an album is going to do when I release it ... Song for song, I thought this was my strongest work to date, so I was very happy with it. But you know, quality and record sales don't necessarily go hand in hand. You just never know."

(RealAudio excerpt of interview).

"The Saga Begins," which follows the entire story of "The Phantom Menace," has been the #1 song on Dr. Demento's syndicated radio comedy show for the last four weeks. Demento, who helped launch Yankovic's career by embracing the young artist's music in the late '70s, said the song demonstrates Yankovic's knack for storytelling and straight-ahead singing.

"It's perhaps in a mode that's a little less zany than before, in that there's not a huge laugh every line," Dr. Demento said. Demento (born Barret Hansen) is working on his 30th-anniversary album for Rhino Records; it should be out in January 2000.

Dr. Demento said he has already played 12 of the 13 cuts from the album on his show, and he plans to play the 13th song, "Grapefruit Diet," a parody of swing band Cherry Poppin' Daddies' "Zoot Suit Riot," soon. "I can't think of another one where every song is a winner like they are on this one," he said.

If "Saga" holds on for another week, it will break Yankovic's old record for the longest-running #1 song on the well-known radio show. "Eat It," a parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It," had a four-week run at #1 in 1983. Yankovic has been the show's most-requested artist since the early '80s.

Running With Scissors, released June 29, finds Yankovic parodying plenty of music that's more recent than "American Pie." He takes on punk-rockers the Offspring with "Pretty Fly (for a Rabbi)" and rapper Puff Daddy with "It's All About the Pentiums."

Yankovic (born Alfred Matthew Yankovic) said he had his usual goal of making Running as varied an album as possible. "My style is that I have no style, that every song on the album sounds about as diametrically opposed to the next song as possible," he said. "You have a hip-hop song going straight into a country-and-western song, into a swing song." (RealAudio excerpt of interview).

That versatility is one of the things that has given Yankovic such longevity, according to Dr. Demento.

"Every year, he's shown us something more that he could do," the radio host said, adding that many parody artists fall into the one-hit-wonder category. "First, it was songs that were pretty unusual and funny, and then it was songs that were unusual and funny and pretty good, too. Al's opened up new frontiers in the art. In part because he's such a fine musician, he's been able to do a convincing parody of every musical style."

Yankovic also supplies some originals on the new album, including "My Baby's in Love With Eddie Vedder." The parodist, who apologizes to Vedder in the liner notes, admitted the tune's image of the Pearl Jam frontman as a grim-faced rock star burdened by his success was a bit dated.

"He's not really the angry young man he was in '91, '92," said Yankovic, who has met Vedder and described him as "a nice guy." "It's not meant to be derogatory. It's just about this guy who's really jealous because his girlfriend has a large crush on Eddie Vedder."

Though he has yet to receive any feedback from the Pearl Jam leader, Yankovic said he believes Vedder will have a sense of humor about the song.

The album's next single will be "It's All About the Pentiums" (RealAudio excerpt), a parody of Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins" that finds Yankovic imagining a computer geek with a gangsta persona.

"Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers?/ Wastin' time with the chat-room yakkers?" he raps in the opening verse. And later, he adds, "You're waxin' your modem, tryin' to make it go faster ... Downloadin' pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar/ And postin' 'Me too!' like some brain-dead AOL-er."

Running also includes one of Yankovic's by-now-familiar medleys of pop hits in polka style. "Polka Power!" (RealAudio excerpt) comprises parts of the Spice Girls' "Wannabe," Pras' "Ghetto Supastar," the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic," to name a few of the sources.

Yankovic found his calling when he recorded "My Bologna," a send-up of the Knack's new-wave hit "My Sharona," while he was working as a college-radio DJ in 1979. He later scored hits with spoofs of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Nirvana, whose "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was transformed into "Smells Like Nirvana" in 1992. Several Yankovic videos were MTV hits.

Yankovic's best-selling album to date was Bad Hair Day (1996), which featured a parody of Coolio's "Gangsta Paradise" called "Amish Paradise."