Songwriting humor

[Cornflake]

I've had moments of intense gratification as a songwriter. I've also had moments when I thought I was wasting a lot of time writing songs that few people would ever hear. For some reason, I remembered some lines from a song written by an old friend of mine, Emily Kaitz, about the second feeling.

I'm tired of all this anonymity
Writing songs almost no one's ever heard
So I'm going to change my name to Emily Refrigerator
So I can be a household word

The lines made me smile when I thought about them.

[Deleted]

Yeah, that's brilliant. Wish I'd come up with it. Damn.

[Gypsy Picker]

I think I mentioned this somewhere along the line, but some years ago my friend Dave was showing me a new song he wrote. He must have nixed this one 'cause I haven't heard it in ages and can only remember the line that made me laugh out loud: "remember as the Good Book says, neither a borrower nor a lender be..."

I told him Hamlet indeed was a good book, but not the one to which he was referring. Bless him, his heart is bigger than his library.

[Deleted]

Clever and I'm a big fan of clever.

[Village Idiot]

I cannot write a funny song. I've tried, but I can't. I think the problem is that I think "gee, I'll make it funny", which kibatz's the humor.

[iamjohnne]

I know eggzackly what you mean Todd. My attempts at funny songs fall flat.

A rapper friend of mine has a song about the internet and losing his girl to AOL. My favorite line in the song is:

I'm just a post on a blog
That nobody checks.

[Deleted]

The thing about funny songs is that they don't have to be laugh out loud funny to qualify as funny. It's a rare thing to hear a song that makes you bust a gut. I think the song I wrote about Village Idiot measuring his office is funny, but it's a goofy funny. Appropriately so, I might add.

Honestly, it's difficult for me to write serious songs as opposed to silly songs. I'm more comfortable in silly.

[Cornflake]

I write both. I write a lot more serious songs than funny ones but I'd have to say that good funny songs are harder to come by and somewhat trickier to write.

[Doug]

Wish I could write silly/funny songs. As we do better with them.
I can write smart ass lines to stick in songs but not silly songs.

[Deleted]

I just wish I could write a song. I realise when I put pen to paper that I have nothing to say..funny or otherwise.

[Deleted]

Rob Herrington is brilliant at a funny song.

[Deleted]

I'm with Scruffy, funny songs rarely make you bust a gut. I write more serious songs than funny ones, but even many of them have a line that gets a chuckle when I sing it. It think a lot of that comes from cultivating a slightly offcenter point of view. Working the quirk, as it were. For instance, I have a lovely (if I do say so )20th Anniversary song I wrote for my partner, and the first line often gets a laugh: I was a closet jerk when I met you...

But when I set out to be funny I almost never am...

[Deleted]

I can't write serious songs. It's very hard for me to do that. Most of my songs are goofy and have some sort of an insult weaved in them.

[Cornflake]

Does anybody else perform both humorous and serious stuff?

My group plays a mix of humorous and serious songs. I'm still struggling with how to do that. We have some ridiculous material. We have many long, slow songs about death. I have trouble designing sets so that the audience doesn't get the bends as we move from one to the other.

One thing I've done is use instrumentals as palate cleansers...stick them between the light and dark stuff to ease the transition. I've tried segregating the funny and serious stuff into three-song clumps, but I didn't care for that much. At the moment, I'm mostly just mixing them up and using the betweeen-song patter to ease the transition.

[Gypsy Picker]

My group sprinkles some humorous material into the mix, but we don't clump it together. I think audiences generally are deft enough to move from mood to mood without the sherbet between each course. The immediate juxtaposition itself may even add something to the experience. I've given up on the well-thought-out set list. Seems to me that our best performances are when we let the audience guide our playlist rather than the other way around. To borrow a phrase, it's about capturing their hearts and minds -- once you've accomplished that, you can take them wherever you want.

[Deleted]

Cornflake's reference to the...

the betweeen-song patter

got me pondering. This is a craft all of it's own and the topic is deserving of a thread of its own here, methinks. I'll be back when I've sussed out some inter-post patter...

[Cornflake]

Scott, I'm almost a nut about the sequence of songs, so I stick to a set list. For example, I never start a set with a really funny song to avoid creating an expectation that it's a comedy act. Anything really depressing or potentially controversial gets placed about 2/3 of the way through, for various reasons. I make sure we don't have too many slow songs in a row or too many fast songs in a row. Then there's making sure not everything in a segment is 4/4 or in a major key.

I think it makes a big difference. I think lack of variety ruins more acts I hear than anything else, and getting enough takes planning.

I know views vary. There are people with your view who are rich and famous, so what do I know.

[Doug]

Flake, start the patter thread.

No I'll go start it.

[Deleted]

I dabble in both serious and humorous. I've been a fan of novelty songs for years.
For writing I suppose I lean toward the humorous more than serious.
For performing I like to open with something humorous or play it early in a set. If I can get people to laugh it helps me to relax and get into a better groove for playing.

[paulschlimm]

Does anybody else perform both humorous and serious stuff?

I play serious music and my wife just laughs at my playing. Does that count??

Paul