Welcome to The Wycliffe Weekender. The Stand-Up Theologian podcast drops on Monday. Loyal Lollards have already had episode 1. Episode 2 is below at the bottom of this email. But first:
Why are funny songs funny?
It’s a good question. If we’re being picky and technical (and I am both of those things when it comes to comedy) the songs are often just fairly basic comic ideas. The joke is often the rhyme rather than a surprising standalone punchline.
There might be an extra game going on. We already have a sense of what the joke is going to be because we know what it’s supposed to rhyme with, and our mind is racing to guess what it could be. Sometimes, the rhyme itself is a delightful little masterpiece, like you might find in Tom Lehrer’s We Will All Go Together When We Go.
All being well, the song gets there first and delights us with the rhyming word. It makes sense of the sentence, the verse, the thought, and the comic idea.
In the conversation we just had on the monthly Zoom chat, we also noticed something else. Sometimes the song itself is a well-known tune which carries a meaning of its own. Put another song on top of that tune and you get a comic counterpoint. The contrast sparks all kinds of associations and connotations.
Music, on its own, is not funny. Dudley Moore playing the piano is funny, but that’s because he’s mashing songs together. You probably have the lyrics in your head already.
There’s something about music that makes the words of a song funnier. What is it?
Personally, I think words have primacy. They are the fundamental source code of the universe. (I talk about this in my show God, the Bible and Everything (in 60 minutes) ) Perhaps I have it the wrong way round and words are basically music. After all, they come from vocal cords and travel as sound waves. That makes them music of a kind. But let’s not get bogged down in that.
Music somehow supercharges words. It takes a funny idea and makes it really funny. It takes a joke and, because it rhymes – or echoes like music – it makes it really funny.
Stand-up comedians instinctively know this. They look down on musical comedians because they believe singing funny songs is cheating. “It’s just too easy,” they tell themselves. In a way, they’re right. Playing a musical instrument, singing, and being funny at the same time is hard. But it’s still a lot easier than stand-up comedy.
(Sidenote: comedians also look down on poets, impressionists, and magicians. Those acts are rare these days. Many comedians see them as tricks or gimmicks which, annoyingly, the audience really enjoys.)
At university, I performed a number of comedy songs with my brilliantly talented friend, Charlie. He had a guitar. We had a song. There were some funny rhymes. One of the songs was a version of ‘She’s Electric’ by Oasis. We changed the words to make it about genetic engineering and cloning. So the first line was ‘She’s genetic’ – which rhymes with the original song, even though I never sang the word ‘electric’. But the audience had it in their mind anyway. The song peaked with a line about cloning ourselves: “I’ll be you and you’ll be me.” That lyric comes from the original song, but now it took on a new meaning.
One of my favourite songs – which I think I wrote – was about kissing a girl in a nightclub, only to discover that it was Alanis Morissette. Suddenly, ‘not calling in the morning’ meant being castigated in song to millions. (This was when Jagged Little Pill was playing everywhere, all the time.)
Another favourite rhyme came in a short song I wrote about mobile phones. Back in the 1990s, they were considered a huge potential health hazard. The song told the tale of Michael Finnegan: Mobile phone beside his chin-igan, Little did he know that it was a carcinogen…
I know, right? Funny. Just turned out not to be true. Ah well.
I also wrote songs for a show that I toured in 2017 about Martin Luther and the 95 Theses. It was called A Monk’s Tale. This is one of those songs:
