The song is the sixth single from Yankovic's 2011 album Alpocalypse, and all the proceeds were donated to the Human Rights Campaign charity.

[7] In April 2011, Yankovic reported that Lady Gaga refused him permission to release "Perform This Way", which he had hoped to use as the lead single for his upcoming album.

[10][11] As Lady Gaga is "a huge Weird Al fan",[12] she subsequently gave Yankovic the green light to include the song on his upcoming album and said she loved the parody.

The video was directed by Yankovic himself, and features Al's head superimposed on the bodies of dancer Vlada Gorbaneva and contortionist Marissa Heart[16] using CG effects.

[18] Yankovic found it a challenge to distill Gaga's public performances as "she's got so many different looks", and had difficulty "figuring out how we're going to do two dozen costumes in three minutes" for the video.

[17] Work on the video started immediately after Yankovic was able to affirm Gaga's permission for the parody, and was completed only days before its release on YouTube.

The cost was considerably high due to the large number of costumes involved, and Yankovic noted that record labels are not as flush with money as they used to be to fund extravagant videos.