Flight of the Conchords, The Distant Future EP

One of the reasons people buy music is to listen to it over and over, because it provokes an emotional response. Often that emotion isn’t even related to the song and is, instead, something that was attached to the song during a particular time and the sense memory of hearing the same sounds again brings those feelings back. We humans are suckers that way.

Comedy, on the other hand, relies on novelty. A joke is only funny a handful of times before it starts to get stale. Can you imagine going to a comedy show to hear the old jokes? “C’mon, tell that bit that I already know the punchline to. I want to laugh like it’s 1999.” This is why people don’t rush out to buy comedy albums.

Musical comedy, then, has two diametric elements — one that makes you want to listen repeatedly and one that makes you want to listen once. So if your stock-in-trade is playing funny songs, you want to maximize the former. The trick to repeatability would seem to be good music. There’s nothing more annoying than a comedian with little musical ability trying to sing a funny song. In that case, the song is little more than a prop. And nobody likes prop comedy. Just ask Gallagher.

But there’s more to a funny song than just the song and on their latest release, Flight of the Conchords walk the delicate line and manage to pull off the musical comedy. Few have made it to this land and lived to tell the tale. Here, in list form, is how the FOCers pull it off:

• Well, it’s funny. Duh. You’re not going to get very far as a comedian without good material.
• And it’s not just funny; it’s layered. You may not catch everything on first listen, so you better go back and make sure you caught it all.
• They include live bits. There is something in the reptile areas of our brains that provokes us to laugh when other people are laughing. This phenomenon leads to what is possibly (reality shows aside) the most annoying thing about watching television: laugh tracks. You hear other people laugh and then you laugh along with them. And then you feel dirty for having been such a chump. But you would never add a laugh track to a comedy recording, right? That would be too obvious. Instead, you would include things that were performed in front of an actual laughing audience. That way you include laughs without seeming so cheesy.
• There is light social commentary. When Bono sings about issues, it lends the music some gravity that makes listening to a song almost like learning something. Same with Flight of the Conchords, except instead of singing about war or Martin Luther King, they sing about how hot it is to have a planned sex night, because there’s nothing on TV Wednesday nights. It works out about the same.
• The music is something that you might listen to even if it weren’t funny. These guys are actually musicians, so you get music that is much more interesting than, say, something you’d hear Adam Sandler do.

There you have it. Now you have the formula, so you can make your own musical comedy album. Be sure to credit me in the liner notes and have your lawyer contact mine to set up the royalty payment. I look forward to your checks.