Given how prominent humor is in our culture, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear more often in music. With some exceptions, artists tend to steer clear of humor or use it sparingly. Joni Mitchell covered the jazz tune “Twisted,” a humorous take on split personality that ends with the line “Two heads are better than one.” Others have used humor to make a point in songs that aren’t humorous per se. Tori Amos uses a line from an Eagles song in “Springtime of His Voodoo” and sings “Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and I’m quite sure I’m in the wrong song.” In “The Waitress” she sings “I want to kill this waitress,” then “but I believe in peace, bitch.” And who can forget the name of her ill-fated band, Y Kant Tori Read? (This calls to mind the ironic band names launched by the punk movement, such as Dead Kennedys, Chrome Dinette, and perhaps the best of all, The The.)
There is an underground tradition of wacky bands, most notably the irreverent, dadaist Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention in the 60s and 70s; the robo-futuristic Devo and the surf music reincarnation the B-52s in the late 70s/early 80s; the experimental They Might Be Giants and the dark humorists Primus in the late 80s and 90s. These bands each pursued unconventional music and singing that creatively challenged the formulas of “normal” music.
Country music has a strong tradition of humor, originating with the corny jokes and elaborate skits between songs in the 30s and 40s. Puns and witty titles have been a long-time staple: “You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith, Too,” “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,” “She Got the Gold Mine and I Got the Shaft.”
Witty lyrics are also a feature of rap. Missy Elliott in “Work It” substitutes a trumpeting elephant for a word in the phrase “If you got a big ***.” Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jef in “You Saw My Blinker (Bitch)” rap “there was this lady in a Pinto coupe, ‘bout 90 years old I could tell by the droop.”
Some performers have established careers around satirical music, including pianist Tom Lehrer with his wry cultural commentary in the 1950s and 1960s, master of musical-political satire Mark Russell, pop song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, and the sophisticated classical music parodist Peter Schickele (masquerading as P.D.Q. Bach).
The occasional novelty song makes a splash. Although most of these are forgettable, a worthy exception is the 1992 hip-hop track “Bushwack” by Tone Def, which cleverly samples speeches from the first President Bush. The syndicated radio show Dr. Demento, originating in Los Angeles in the early 70s, specializes in novelty songs from the past like “Davy’s Dinghy,” “Purple People Eater,” “Big Ten Inch Record” (covered by Aerosmith at the start of their career) and satirical arrangements of popular songs by mid-century bandleader Spike Jones.
While it is relatively straightforward to elicit humor through lyrics or musical style used ironically, it is more difficult — and less common — to use the elements of music such as pitch and rhythm humorously. One example is from Steely Dan’s “Your Gold Teeth,” which makes a reference to mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian and the difficult, avant-garde vocal music she sang. Following the line “Even Cathy Berberian knows there’s one roulade she can’t sing,” the piano strikes a solitary high, dissonant note.
