Among the countless rocks tracing silent ellipses around the sun, one has now been given a name that carries laughter in it. The International Astronomical Union has formally designated an asteroid after Weird Al Yankovic, the accordion-wielding parodist whose five-decade career transformed pop music's most earnest moments into vehicles for joy. It is a quiet but telling gesture — science pausing to acknowledge that the capacity to make a civilization laugh, consistently and with genuine craft, is its own form of lasting contribution.