The Funny Thing About Song Writing....

Songwriting and comedy.

Hello all you lovely people. I hope you’re having a great festive season.
My subject today? Comedy and Music.

How come all the song-writers I know are so funny? I was thinking about this the other day while watching a standup on TV and I realised that the two disciplines have quite a few things in common.

Firstly, laughing (like feeling music) is an unconscious process. You can’t decide to find something funny, just as much as you can’t decide to fall in love with a piece of music. How many times have you caught yourself laughing at something you shouldn’t? A risqué joke? a mean gag? A sick one-liner? A giggle that you can’t help comes out (these are the times you laugh and put your hand over your mouth in shock). This is the real you. In life we spend ninety percent of our time pretending to be someone else, as what we’re really thinking would offend or upset people. When you laugh at something you shouldn’t, It’s our dark subconscious saying hi. The same dark subconscious may also secretly love songs that you know you shouldn’t like, cheesy songs, lame power ballads. You know what I’m talking about!

And how about universal truths? Songwriters and comedians are brave (or stupid?) enough to be honest. We’ve all heard the saying ‘tears of a clown’ well, songwriters are some of the darkest, sickest, melancholy people around. We know our subconscious a bit too well sometimes We go out on a limb to say ‘I feel this is true but nobody’s saying it. Is it just me?’ A universal truth is going to connect with lots of people but it’s the angle not the truth itself that is paramount to making a song or gag work.

‘Nobody talks in lifts’ (or elevators to all you not in the U.K)’ is a universal truth but this in itself isn’t funny, neither does this truth tell you anything about yourself. The songwriter and comedian are trying to look behind the truism to explore the angles.

It might be as simple as a comedian raising the question.

‘Why does no motherfucker talk in the elevator?’ (bad words are funny)
Who started that shit? Was there a meeting about it? Even kids don’t talk in elevators. Who told them? How do we all know it’s the elevator law? Even my girlfriend, who never stops talking, clams up in the elevator.. It’s the only time day or night she shuts up. I rented an apartment on the 18th floor just to get some peace’
We don’t talk in elelvators cos we’re scared. We’ve seen disaster movies. We all stand there, mute, thinking about the slightly frayed rusty cable overhead and hoping to God another fat person doesn’t get on, and working out if the cable snapped and we plummeted down 30 floors it might be possible to jump up at the exact moment before the elevator hits the ground and survive.

O.K, I know it’s not particularly funny, that’s why I’m an unsuccessful songwriter rather than an unsuccessful comedian. The songwriter, would use this universal truth but frame it in a scenario, often a relationship.

‘we used to talk, but now it’s like we share an elevator
same building, different floors
silently waiting for the doors’

The listener might connect with the lyric because they’ve worked out the angle themselves (ah! Nobody talks in elevators). The comedian and the songwriter are both trying to say something that connects with you because you’ve thought it yourself but haven’t articulated it in this way.

Then there’s the time frame. Most comedians have an open slot of between 3 and 5 minutes to capture your attention. The same goes for most songs. The comedian and the songwriter have to grab your attention quickly. To get to the chorus, is in effect, to get to the punch line. In many songs the verses carry a narrative- who, where, when and how. The Chorus is often where the writer says ‘and this is why I say….. (the angle)’. A stand up often uses the same technique of tension and resolve. This build up of tension to the punch-line and the release when it comes (this is true of the journey to a song’s chorus also) is sublime. We’re waiting to laugh. Stand-ups may even call it riffing- just like musicians do. Repetition often helps the laughs, and the song.  And sometimes we don’t laugh, or we don’t ‘get’ the song. This may be because the standup thought something was a universal truth that wasn’t…..

‘Hey, everyone hates dogs! Right?

Or a songwriter talks about truth that’s been explored a million times

‘You don’t know what you got until it’s gone’ (yawn)

And we all know the song is only as good as the singer makes it. The singer has to carry the message. A great comedian can get laughs from O.K material. But a comedian with poor timing (phrasing in the case of a singer) or limited range, won’t wring the maximum potential out of the joke (or song). Not all comedians write their own material, not all singers write their own songs. What a great singer or comedian can do is realise the material brilliantly. They make it shine.

Finally, there’s the beauty of shared experience, of being in the audience. All laughing at the same joke, all singing along with your favourite band in a sweaty moshpit.

Music and comedy tell us that however alone we feel, we’re not alone.