Put this in your theory of humor
and get nothing!
Seriously, this strikes me and a lot of people as pretty funny, but isn’t much like the typical joke.
Edited to add: Poll and discussion. Short version: being amused by the song is rarer than I would have thought, though the LW consensus may be usually strong.
It didn’t amuse me at all for the first 40 seconds or so. Then I thought about the fact that the song was still about nothing, and I was still listening to it, and that was a bit funny. Then I stopped.
I see from the comments on YouTube it’s a variation on a Yiddish song complaining about having only potatoes all the time.
When the Fugs version starts out, it reminds me a little bit of the Toy Doll’s version of Nellie the Elephant: a rock band subverting a kids’ song.
The Fugs go way, way further, gradually building to a climax of nihilism. The contrast between the relatively familiar and harmless beginning and the surrealistic end, with no clear seam or border between them, is funny, in the way that Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch was funny.
That was my take. But then I thought Waiting for Godot and a lot of Franz Kafka was funny, too.
I think Waiting for Godot is hilarious and but that the song is not.
Just to clarify where I’m coming from, I thought the song was funny in more or less the same manner as the Cheese Shop sketch, but not nearly to the same degree.
I don’t get it.
That suggests a question: what is the difference between you, me, wedrifid, and others who don’t see the humor … and NancyLebovitz et al. who do?
I like xkcd and Terry Pratchett (though more for the ideas and attitude than the humor—the humor is apt to be pretty stereotyped).
I like good single puns, but have lost a good bit of my taste for long series of puns on a subject. I blame Anthony and Robinson.
I like one-liners and paradoxical humor.
Sometimes I like slapstick. I thought the movie Noises Off (screwball comedy leaks from a play into the lives of the cast) was extremely funny. There’s a consensus that a good stage production is twice as funny, which is hard for me to imagine. In any case, as soon as a cactus showed up, it was pleasing to know that someone would sit on it.
I thought the stuff in early HPMOR where Harry was rolling over the adults was extremely funny. Other things were funny, too, but that’s what comes to mind as a theme.
In the way of data: I like XKCD, Terry Pratchett, and obscene humor, but am less amused by slapstick than average (partly due to effort because I don’t want to like it). Also, I find modern art lame, and this reminded me of it.
I was too confused to be amused, because I soon as heard the music start, I assumed that I was listening to Zuntik Bulbes, and just as I realized that I was not, he switched into Yiddish for a bit, re-confusing me.
The original song this is sort of based on goes, translated into English, as follows: “Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes, Tuesday and Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday potatoes. But on Shabbos we have potato kugel! Monday potatoes again.” You can hear a rendition of the non-inane version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmvGq0SZGL0
My reaction to this has changed over the past week. First I thought it was lame and silly. Then it got stuck in my head one night and kept me up, and I hated it and NancyLebovitz. Then it continued to be stuck in my head off and on, and Stockholm Syndrome or something must have kicked in because now I like it and think it’s amusing.
The getting-stuck-in-my-head is probably not a function of the song’s natural ear worm potential. I get songs stuck in my head very easily, (perhaps because I hear my thoughts in spoken English like an internal monologue).
Something similar happened to me, but over a period of many months.
I was going to post that I didn’t find this funny, but I did find it amusing, and I was going to ask if others had a similar reaction.
And then I skipped ahead to about the halfway mark, when it started using more interesting examples like Allen Ginsberg and Village Voice, and it started to become funny rather than amusing.
Did anybody else have a similar reaction?
I think the distinction I have in mind between funny and amusing is that funny invokes a more visceral and physical response, whereas amusing is a more purely intellectual response.
I grinned at a few points, but didn’t find it particularly funny, overall. Though if the recording and the visuals had been done a bit better, this might have been the sort of thing I would have liked.
(But something about this reminded me of the “22 Men” sketch from “The 2000-Year-Old Man”, which I did find funny.)
While we’re on the subject, I’m curious if anyone else here finds things like Pokey the Penguin funny… and if there are any theories of humour that would explain why I find it hilarious while most people just find it baffling and pointless (or mildly amusing at best).
Pokey the Penguin is brilliant. Four dead babies out of five!
Note that gentile listeners will probably have no idea what this is a parody of. (Well, at least I hadn’t—but OTOH there are very few Jews around where I come from; is Yiddish folk music more widely known among gentiles in places with more Jews, such as the US?)
I thought it was funny when they got to the months, and then the numbers. Not so much the rest.
Glancing at the lyrics, it seems that the numbers are supposed to be years.
This is almost as funny as The Mighty Boosh. That is, it’s completely not. It’s just stupid. But you can imagine how it would be funny if a couple of parts of your brain were insufficiently developed.
Unless there was something at the end that was funny? I got through 30 odd seconds and thought I got the gist of it...
If find the song much less grating than The Mighty Boosh which lets me be vaguely amused instead of annoyed and angry like I was the two times I saw The Mighty Boosh.
I believe I would have found it funnier as a kid. I remember finding extreme randomness very amusing. But the thing is, randomness is really all one joke. And that joke gets old.
Downvote for dissing the Mighty Boosh. I mean come on. Cheese is a type of meat?