Comprehensive information and links about Dr. Demento

Dr. Demento , who has made a successful career as a radio disc jockey specializing in novelty songs and pop music parodies. He created the persona in 1970 while working at Los Angeles station KPPC-FM. Legend has it, after Hansen played "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus on the radio, someone said that he had to be demented to play that. Thereafter, the name stuck. His weekly show went into syndication in 1974 and is still on the air as of 2006. He has also released many compilations of music featured on his show on vinyl records, audio tape cassettes, and compact discs.

To some people, he is best known as the man who brought rock parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic to national attention, as well as Dr. Elmo's 1979 Christmas song "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer".

Hansen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941, the son of an amateur pianist, and claims to have started his vast record collection as early as age 12, when he found "that a local thrift store had thousands of old 78 RPM records for sale at 5 cents each". He attended Reed College, where he wrote a thesis on Wagnerian opera, and later the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from which he earned a master's degree in folklore and ethnomusicology.

Hansen has developed a particular interest in the roots of rock 'n' roll in RB and country music, and he has written about it in many magazine articles, liner notes to compilations and new recordings by a variety of artists, and two chapters on early R. His shows and public appearances display an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of recorded music in general, from the earliest Edison cylinder recordings onward.

Dr. Demento was inducted into the Comedy Music Hall Of Fame in June of 2005.

Trivia

At the end of each year on his comedy music show, he counts down the top 25 comedy hits of the year (in earlier years, he did the top 50). The chart is based solely on requests, so it's not unheard of for classic comedy songs to appear on the chart for many years in a row. Despite that, there have only been 3 instances of the same artist repeating at the #1 spot with different tunes 2 years in a row.