Where are all the funny bands?

Cheekface is a very funny band. My friend Greg is the lead singer of Cheekface, and when we sat down to catch up at Washington Square Diner the other day after their sold-out show at Elsewhere, packed full of superfans who knew all the words and reached a frenzied fever pitch during the band’s third consecutive performance of the absurdist track “Noodles”, the conversation inevitably turned to his satirical lyrical stylings, which truly stand out amongst indie rock’s sea of self-serious mumbling.

“There aren’t a lot of truly funny bands out there,” I mused, and he agreed. But why is that?

I enjoy a lot of music, but most of the bands and artists I really really love, with a deep fannish love, not only make good music but are also very funny.

Growing up it was all about the Beatles, Queen, and They Might Be Giants—bands that kids like just as much as adults, if not more, because they are broadly entertaining, not simply excellently musical. TMBG’s first kids’ album, No!, which came with a CD-ROM full of cheeky musical animations, was a mainstay on my teal translucent iMac circa 2003.

The Beatles were just as influenced by the madcap freeform comedy of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show as they were by American rock and blues. The rhythms of British humor intertwined themselves with the chord changes of Little Richard and Elvis. Their performances in their films, particularly A Hard Day’s Night!, showed them to be adept comedic performers, and their off-the-cuff riffs and quips in press interviews, particularly with idiotic Americans, are a goldmine of improvisatory humor.

When I discovered Tally Hall in 2014, a few years after they broke up, it was like a revelation. Here was a band which was lyrically and musically on the level of my childhood favorites but which also produced endlessly quotable comedy sketch videos and even a full web series (my god, they were ahead of their time) that had me constantly cracking up.

The pattern repeated itself in subsequent obsessions. Vulfpeck: a very funny band; Jack Stratton’s early sketch videos and the comedic tone in the band’s press material were what drew me in, as the music (at first!) wasn’t super my thing. Currently I’m obsessed with Getdown Services, a British indie-electro-post-punk duo who are magnificently funny along with being proprietors of a catalog of mosh-pit earworms.

I am always on the lookout for more stuff like this: stuff that hits both my funny bones and my eardrums in the right way. But there isn’t much out there right now.

Think about how many comedians or comedy-first performers use music as an element of their comedy. Adam Sandler is probably the ur-example; amongst my friends and acquaintances in New York, LA, & the UK I can heartily recommend Rose Kelso, Jazz Emu, Demi Adejuyigbe, Two Hearts, Josh Glanc, Michelle Brasier and many more.

Groups like Flight of the Conchords and Garfunkel and Oates primarily play to comedy audiences—the world of “musical comedy” is a comedic world. Some comedians, like Tim Heidecker, put out serious music; Kyle Mooney put out a record halfway between comedy and serious which didn’t work either way, according to some Reddit critics.

It’s much more difficult to think of people who are good musicians first and foremost who are also very funny; acts like Cheekface who play to music fan crowds and make them laugh as much as they make them dance. Jack Stratton, obviously. Father John Misty, frequently. My good pals in Thumpasaurus:

The UK has the funniest bands: the aforementioned Getdown Services; some of Wet Leg’s songs are understatedly silly; Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw has a dry, sardonic approach to lyricism that I enjoy. And Audrey Hobert, one of my favorite new artists of the past year, is probably the funniest pop singer out there right now: a facility she honed for years in comedy TV writers’ rooms. That humor has been essential in connecting with her audience.

But a lot, if not most, of the new/up-and-coming indie rock and pop out there right now is completely humorless. Cameron Winter’s music is essentially humorless. Good, but humorless; which is at odds with his often understatedly funny stage presence.

This may be reductive but essentially it seems to me that it’s much easier to be a good comedian who is decent at music than a good musician who is also genuinely funny, that is, funny in the context of their work. The exceptions are the ones that stand out.

David Zucker, brother of Zach and elite comedy social media consultant, pointed out to me recently that musicians and comedians have different standards for measuring success. Comedians know they’re doing good if they get a laugh. Musicians don’t have access to that metric—other than applause, the audience experience of their performance in all its intricacy is locked up inside individual members of that audience.

So comedians can more easily refine their material in response to audience response; they can get funnier and funnier, and thanks to social media, they can also find the niche audiences for whom that material works best. Musicians meanwhile have to rely on an antiquated, creaky system of cultural arbiters and interpersonal feedback from producers, friends, etc. in order to refine their material.

If someone is good at or interested in both music and comedy, they are far more likely to lean comedy and do music on the side rather than vice versa.

Are comedy audiences easier to master and to build a fanbase amongst? Acts like Tom Cardy and Ninja Sex Party do not market themselves in the music world… this may be a sign of a comedy-privileging “contamination effect” whereby most artists who make music that is over a certain percentage comedic are automatically sorted into comedy-land, even if the music is also excellent.

To be a successful music artist in the 2020s you are expected to be a master of your instrument, your vocals, lyricism, social media marketing, tour management, design, PR…. Adding humor on top of that is a tall order. If you have spent your time grinding all of the above to have a chance at making it, you’re not going to waste time on sketch comedy—especially if, as seems to be the case, doing so brings with it a clear and present danger of being judged to be [gasp] a musical comedian, of all things, and sets one up to be shuffled automatically into the other bucket.

Musicians, generally, want to be taken seriously at the end of the day—comedy is the opposite of that. Not everyone can be Steely Dan or Cake or the fucking Beatles and manage to effectively suspend particles of high-quality humor in a musical solution. No wonder more people don’t try.

Conversely, for practiced comedians it is not that difficult to add in hobbyist-level (or higher) music as an element of their act, and doing so doesn’t jeopardize their status: in fact it might well enhance it, showing one to be a talented multi-hyphenate, like Bo Burnham or the Lonely Island.

Our greatest living humorist, Thomas Pynchon, is a music nut: his books are packed with original lyrics and (often gleefully anachronistic) riffs and references to popular music of all eras. But he didn’t become a musician or a comedian, because why would you do either when you could become a feted novelist, which back in the 1960s was higher up the status pyramid than either?

One of Pynchon’s favorite artists is Spike Jones, a midcentury bandleader whose zany orchestral antics formed a bridge between vaudeville and the musical humor that came after (Tom Lehrer, Weird Al). Vaudeville, America’s primary popular entertainment form during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a hodgepodge of high and low, musical and comedic and dramatic, opera and acrobatics and animal acts. The Marx Brothers, vaudeville’s favorite sons, included serious musical interludes in their film comedies along with silly ones; but that would not fly today. Genre-fication came fast for culture as a consequence of mass marketing’s congealing effect.

Particularly in music, where genre is king, stuff that reaches out across the borders is difficult to sell to people—it’s a little easier in comedy, which is why the genre-defying Stamptown variety night has finally secured its first Netflix special.

I think that people who enjoy being funny and also enjoy playing music are more likely to put in the work to become funnier and more successful on a comedic level than to put in the work to grind the really dire and oftentimes over-serious dungeon levels of the rock industry. Getting instant feedback from an audience’s laughter sure seems like a better deal than getting a 6.7 from Condé-era Pitchfork to me.

The boundary line is a hard one to ride. Charlene Kaye, who I’ve been a huge fan of since I was in high school, has seen her career take off since leaning into being a comedian who plays music. Her straightforward indie rock music from before, while excellent, was not funny; that was never originally part of her brand. But now that she’s more well-known as a comedic performer than a musician, she’s starting a brand new separate alias to release her non-funny music under, so that it doesn’t come up when people search Charlene Kaye looking for her comedy stuff.

Today my fondest wish is that someone, or a group of someones, brushes past all of these difficulties and the everpresent threat of funny-induced uncoolness aside to become a new 2020s answer to the Monkees or Tally Hall or Jellyfish: a charismatic rock band with great music as well as a strong and unique sense of humor woven through its stage presence and visual materials.

If you have heard of a band like this or are even a member of one please let me know so that I can proceed to stan.