By The Landlord
“Ladies and gentlemen, I've suffered for my music, now it's your turn.” – Neil Innes
“Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.” – Chet Atkins
"Laughter is the greatest music in the world … Comedy should never be over-analysed. It's either funny or it isn't. There's a subtle difference between those who say funny things and those who say things funny.” – Ken Dodd
“I’ve always kind of considered him the J. D. Salinger of demented music.” – Weird Al Jankovic on Tom Lehrer
“Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.” – Noel Coward
“A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience.” – Tim Minchin
“All kinds of things have gone into my shows - cajun and rock bands, Bollywood, Kraftwerk tributes, effects and so on. As long as it services the comedy, everything is up for grabs.”– Bill Bailey
“I know Bono and he knows Ono and she knows Eno's phone goes thus: ‘Brian's not at home, he's at the North Pole. But if you'd like to leave a weird noise.’” – Nigel Blackwell, Half Man Half Biscuit (Eno Collaboration)
“I can't stand innuendo. If I see one in a script I whip it out immediately.” – Kenneth Williams
“A dyslexic man walks into a bra.” – Tommy Cooper
“They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.” – Bob Monkhouse
“I told you I was ill.” – Spike Milligan’s gravestone inscription (in Gaelic)
Music was continually coming out of my printer this morning. I couldn’t stop it jamming.
But I’ve always got stuck into it. I used to play in an orchestra, but then came a personal blow – I was fired because the conductor said I was too high-flute-in. I asked the harpist for help. She said she could pull a few strings.
Then I tried to complain to the composer, but he couldn’t be found anywhere – he was Haydn. To improve myself, I looked at some beautiful new scales. I got a pet snake. Then I turned to jazz, but only because of an accident – I spilled tea on the piano and it was suddenly ragtime. Then I tried to reverse my musical direction with blues and country, but things got strange that way round – in the lyrics the narrator got let out of jail, the dog came back to life, and the lover always returned. It was all weirdly good news - tragedy turning to comedy, but was that good for songwriting? And then my career really started to balloon, that is, until it went pop.
Profuse apologies for any pain caused by the above paragraphs. Comedy is very difficult. It’s a genre David Bowie, in his early career, flirted with – his aspirations to be a bit like musical theatre’s Anthony Newley – but failed at. Certainly in his case, and for all of us too, for the best. But this week it’s time to celebrate comedic songs, those written specifically to tickle, to amuse, to make you smile and laugh. If they do that, then they count.
The prolific Liverpudlian standup comedian and friend to the Beatles, Ken Dodd, who would dazzle and exhaust his audience with often four-hour shows in which he would pack in a minimum of seven quick-fire laughs every minute, has already talked about the intangibility and impossibility to fully analyse humour, but also compared comedy to a wide spectrum of light. At one end – the dark bruising shades of bleak, biting gallows humour and sarcasm, at the other, the white, pure light of silliness and children’s laughter.
So this week, through the prism of song and other pieces, hopefully we can produce a wide spread of styles, not merely via lyrics, but also selections full of music-referencing jokes. The mischievous Mozart himself did this with his own A Musical Joke (Ein musikalischer Spaß, 1787) highlighting and mocking the incompetence of other composers and players will all kinds of clever silliness, including some wince-inducing horn playing and a violin cadenza which almost ends in the wrong key, poking fun at and annoying many in court circles.
Mozart. Full of mischief
No genre is too serious to not get the comedy treatment. In the 20th century English–Canadian singer and pianist Anna Russell did many sketches parodying composers such as Richard Wagner highbrow operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, as well as performances on How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera. On Wagner’s work, she highlights the epic plot’s various absurdities – moments after identifying Gutrune as the first woman the young hero Siegfried has ever met who hasn’t been his aunt, she famously insists “I’m not making this up, you know!” – distilling this this 20-hour epic into a mere 20 minutes.
No doubt there will be many musical parodies across the pop and other genres nominated - from different lyrics to existing tunes, poking fun at artists and styles, but also many great original songs too. Ideally some of the results will gather songs which aren’t a festival of too much cheese, but rich recipes of musical and lyrical skill, nuance and emotion too, of filled with sharp satire, debonair and droll, as well as that harder-to-define area of adorable silliness.
Comedy theatre and film might also help fill a few boots, from old music hall and vaudeville to the golden age of musicals, to satires such as Monty Python or Spinal Tap.
Meanwhile in more recent times, among the TV musical comedy sketches I never get tired of include the great Morecambe & Wise 1971 Christmas special with conductor Andre Previn attempting Grieg’s Piano Concerto …
… to the SNL skit on Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken (“I need more cowbell!).
More cowbell: SNL
And this, one better perhaps known with British audiences, Kevin Eldon and co parodying the infamously controversial (at the time), sweary 1976 TV interview of The Sex Pistols by Bill Grundy, but put into the context of an Amish community. Every phrase, facial expression and timing is perfectly recreated.
So then, it’s now time to pass the comedy baton to this week’s comedy compere, Marco den Ouden, who will compare your suggestions. If the song is meant to amuse and it has this effect on you, please nominate. It’s time for some January laughs. Place your suggestion in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week.
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