Pop Music = Comedy, and vice versa

My love for pop and my love for comedy seem like the same thing. How about you?

When I was a young man doing publicity for Barry Trotter, I’d often say quite truthfully, “I only became a comedy writer because The Beatles weren’t hiring.” This may seem like a strange thing to say—I don’t think many 32-year-olds today consider the two fields adjacent, much less the same thing. But for a time, a generation or so, music and comedy were joined at the hip.

The first UK quartet to conquer America (or at least Jackie Kennedy).

I’m not talking about both being tentacles of the showbiz cephalopod, and even less about Del-style improv’s straining to generate rockshow-style excitement for every random Harold on a Tuesday in February. (“Step one: pick a raucous song. Step two: play it VERY LOUDLY as the troupe runs up the center aisle clapping and hooting. Step three: try to ignore the bowling alley downstairs.”) I’m talking about when rock and comedy felt like they were being made by the same kinds of people, for the same kinds of intelligent, sexy, anarchic ends, and were enjoyed by one audience. How Christopher Guest probably could’ve been a rock star, but chose to do this instead.

If you simply stack data, it’s inescapable: the heavies of comedy and rock and roll rubbed shoulders for at least twenty years, and not just at coke-fueled parties in the Hollywood Hills. There was a conversation going on between the two arts. (For example: this sketch from 1976.) This meant that all of us who began fanatical about one, likely developed a taste for the other; in a simple example, I was introduced to Beyond the Fringe via reading about The Beatles.

Sometimes the conversation was overt.

George Harrison himself famously stated that the spirit of The Beatles went into Monty Python. (Maybe a jot of that spirit was returned—with interest—in 1978, when John Lennon passed Neil Innes on the street and began humming “Cheese and Onions.”) Sometimes the influence went one way—The Goons’ influence on The Beatles’ playfulness in interviews, or A Hard Day’s Night being directed by the same fellow, Richard Lester, who helped create The Running Jumping Standing Still Film with Sellers—and sometimes it went the other, as when Zep the Stones and The Who helped spread the samizdat popularity of Derek and Clive, or when Harrison mortgaged his house to fund Life of Brian. SNL itself was born at the confluence of comedy and pop, a cultural nexus that really doesn’t exist anymore. The one and only Python/SNL collab was “All You Need Is Cash.” With something like This is Spinal Tap, where does the comedy end and pop music begin? I was not surprised when I learned that Conan O’Brien plays rock guitar; even less so that he was heading up a lot of the U.S. publicity for Macca’s latest book—I’m sure Conan would also say, “I did comedy because The Beatles weren’t hiring.”

There is a book here, and maybe I’ll write it; now that I’ve shuttered my Beatles blog (at one point the largest Beatles fan site on the internet), I do need an outlet for these kinds of thoughts. Peter Sellers wasn’t the Fifth Beatle, but he has solid bonafides for being the Twenty Fifth. I don’t exactly know why humor and rock and roll seemed to tarry together for more than a decade, and I’d be interested to figure out how and why their paths diverged. But for a generation or two, it sure seemed like the same thing. Was it this way for you? Or nah? Answer in the poll.