Musical Comedy: The Chocolate-Covered Ribeye Steak of Art

Wait!

Come back!


I promise, this isn't going to be a list of grainy iPhone video of "this hilarious guy from Rumours" singing "Excuse me while I kiss this guy!" in a bad Hendrix impression.

Good comedy in music is a much different beast than either comedy or music.
If you're Bruce Springsteen and you don't play Born To Run in concert, the E Street Band starts getting threatening phone calls.
But people overwhelmingly don't like to hear jokes they've already heard from their favourite comedian. Sure, some great comics will end their show with a classic bit, like Jim Gaffigan's Hot Pockets, but if you saw Lewis Black and he did Old Yeller straight off the page, you'd be more pissed than Ron White.

There are a few comedians who will have a small musical part of their act, but there's usually something else going on there.

Mechanism of Comedy: People playing guitar/piano while telling short jokes

(see Dimitri Martin) 

People like my mom (not pictured) get really annoyed when comedians do this. Why do they?

When people who aren't Louis C.K., Jim Gaffigan, or Aziz Ansari make a stand-up special, they don't own it. They work with a production company like Comedy Central who shoots, edits, and owns it. Most of the time they edit it as close to the way it was performed as possible, but when the show is 60 minutes and they need to edit it to 47-ish minutes some stuff has to go.

Also, specials are shot over 2 performances, so in case a joke fails or something weird happens, they can get it on the next one. 

SO, when a comedian plays an instrument over a series of jokes, what they are actually doing is ensuring that those jokes are not edited out of order.
The music means that not even Michael Bay's editor could cut quickly or cleanly enough to take a joke and put it somewhere else.


Here are a few comedians you've heard of and some you almost certainly haven't who keep the bar high for musical comedians:

Tom Lehrer

He is the Mel Blanc, the Alan Turing, the Rosa Parks of comedy in music. A Harvard-trained mathmetician, Lehrer was smarter than everyone in the room with his witty, musically diverse, and his edgy-for-the-time tongue-in-cheek social commentary. 

Garfunkel and Oates (NSFW)

This duo juxtaposes their upbeat, ukelele-driven pop songs with some of the dirtiest, funniest observational humour that I've heard. WARNING: they do get pretty dirty, so tread carefully if you're easily offended.

"Weird Al" Yankovic

If Tom Lehrer is Beethoven, Weird Al is Barry Manilow. He's not for everyone, but he's remained relevant for decades and still fills stadiums with his dedicated fan base. I the grabbed newer stuff from across his 20+ year career, but I'll start with one showing the level of commitment he puts into his work, love him or hate him he is very good at what he does.

If you want more check out more musical comedians, check out Paul and Storm, Hard and Phirm, The Lonely Island, or Flight of the Conchords

Posted in: comedian,comedians,comedy,Flight of the Conchords,Garfunkel and Oates,Hard and Phirm,Lonely Island,Music,Paul and Storm,Tom Lehrer,Weird Al,Weird Al Yankovic