Sadly, humour isn’t all that common in the music world. But the kings of comedy, for me, had to be The Tubes. I saw them on their White Punks On Dope tour, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
An honourable mention has to go to Cheech and Chong for their wacky stoned humor.
Humour crops up in odd places, though. The English prog group Renaissance suffered a power failure in one of their concerts and they filled in the time cracking jokes; very good at it, they were too.
Are we talking mainstream music acts who are funny, or comedy musical acts? The latter include pretty much everyone who has ever been played on Doctor Demento (Weird Al Yankovic, Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, Barnes and Barnes, etc) and I’d definitely including Tenacious D and Cheech and Chong in that category.
The former…maybe Robbie Williams or The Kaiser Chiefs.
And They Might Be Giants fall between the two camps - they are a “real” act but are decidedly weird.
Some of their songs are plain funny, others just carry a message (like most songs I guess) but it is plain they have a sense of (albeit very English) humour. Unfortunately many of their cultural references are very difficult to spot unless you have lived in England for the past 40 years.
Their album titles include:
Trouble over Bridgewater (a place near the Welsh borders) Back in the DHSS (former name for the Social Security office) Four Lads Who Shook the Wirrel (one of their many Beatles references)
*Cammell Laird Social Club *(Buena Vista like reference to close Birkenhead ship yard)
Tim Minchin big time. I just got tickets for his show in Minneapolis (and pretty much danced with glee when I saw he was coming, even though Bears don’t dig on dancing).
Cheryl Wheeler is quite hilarious when she’s not being depressing. Check out “Your God” or “Little Kids”
Camille West only released one CD (and one cassette that was never released on CD). She was with the Four Bitchin’ Babes for a while. “Viagara on the Water” was a minor hit, but check out “Getting Raptured”
richard cheese! he covers rock/rap/pop songs in a swinging lounge style (the band is called lounge against the machine). the kicker is that the band are actually good enough to make the music good, so it’s good to listen to and not just a listen once “oh i get it” joke. his stuff is superb.
i recommend the albums “the sunny side of the moon” and “tuxicity”
These are amateurs. The champion funny musical act (in the rock eva) is and ever will be the Bonzo Dog Band.. Here’s “Hunting Tigers Out in Indiah” and their most famous song, “[The Intro and the Outro.” The group is the musical equivalent of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (that’s a precise description: members of Monty Python worked with them, and members of the Bonzo Dog Band wrote songs for Monty Python).
Prior to the rock era, it’s Spike Jones and his City Slickers, of course. Here’s “Cocktails for Two.” (Wait for it).
Both groups are unique in that they can make you laugh at instrumentals.
For more subtle musical humor, you can go with Flanders and Swan. Here’s their classic “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear.”
I’m not very keen on opera (to put it mildly), but one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard is Anna Russell’s analysis of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Try it: you won’t regret it.
My ex turned me on to Garfunkel and Oates, a two-woman comedy band. Lots of videos on YouTube… One of my favorites is Pregnant Women Are Smug. (It also helps that Kate Micucci, the brunette, has a really quirky cuteness that makes me swoon!)
I’m going to reveal some of my bank geekiness and mention Victor Borgeand PDQ Bach.
Victor Borge did some “non-musical” comedy stuff such as his Phonetic Punctuation and Inflationary Language which are a laugh in themselves. (Dang, can’t link to youtube from here!)
PDQ Bach sticks in my mind because we played his Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds & Percussion in high school band and snuck the kazoos and slidewhistles in all the other peices we played too.
I came in to mention Anna Russell and Victor Borge, but I was beat to it. There’s more to Anna Russell than her Analysis of the Ring Cycle…she had a decades-long career in comedic music.
