alt Hacker NewsLots of the shots in white and nerdy are literally showing what the lyrics are describing, is there another level to them with references I’ve missed?
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It's Riding Dirty but it it's about a guy who does anything but.
It's a song about how white people find black culture cool but are themselves stereotypically uncool.
It's a song about nerd culture and celebrating that, wherein a white nerd makes the same kinds of boasts that black rappers do in their music, but about nerd stuff.
It's layered, as any good parody has to be, with cultural references. When Al mows the lawn, he isn't just mowing the lawn because the lyrics say he's mowing the lawn, he's mowing the lawn because that's a sterotype of white people, and the intent is to show how uncool Al is and how unlikely he is to fit into the culture he aspires to. Note that when Key and Peele show up they lock the door on their convertible. This is a joke because their convertible is down and locking it while literally useless is an expression of their frustration with Al's nerdiness, it's also something white people stereotypically do around black people. The candles behind him are arranged like a Pac-Man. Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?
In "Amish Paradise" there's a part where Al sweats profusely. This is both a reference to the hard physical labor employed by the Amish and to the original Gangster's Paradise video.
The levels you're missing are irony, cultural awareness and genre awareness. The context is what makes the humor work.
That's because White and Nerdy isn't a standalone song (if it was, it would be rubbish). It only has value as referential humour and self deprecating parody. So by being literal, it's using juxtaposition to emphasise the humour: It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon because one would typically expect there to be something related to black culture, as in the start of the music video.
If it wasn't a parody of an existing song, and the popular genre, it would be complete garbage. Nothing about the song would work.