The 10 Greatest Comic Songs of All Time

As chosen by me

Great comic songs are few and far between

There are thousands of brilliant stand-up routines, sketches, and sitcoms, but brilliant comic songs are a much rarer beast. That’s because they are so much harder to produce. You’ve got to write something funny (hard), it has to scan and rhyme (harder), the tune has to be good (also hard), you have to perform it well and it has to make some kind of point.

I’m not talking about clever re-versions of existing songs, but original material. Good comic songs are very, very rare.

On the other hand, a song - comic or not - if you get it right, can be played again and again. You might watch a sitcom or a skit you like several times. Your absolute faves you might watch as many as fifty times. But you can listen to a song again and again, thousands of times. A song bears repetition in a way no other form can match. The whole country might hum a song if it catches on. They can enter the national and even international consciousness. That’s why they use them so much in ads. Songs are mighty things.

The same applies to comic songs. We are still singing Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall classics over 100 years after they were first composed. 

But one man’s greatest ever is another man’s rubbish. We are in the realms of the subjective. 

Enjoy!

Dominic

PS One of the rules of this list is no re-versions. Otherwise I would have included Newport (State of Mind), which I watched over and over when it first came out, largely for the performance of Terema Wainwright. Can’t believe she’s not a huge comic star. Super words too from Tom Williams, Leo Sloley and MJ Delaney.

There are Spotify links to each of these songs, as I cover them, plus YouTube embeds where possible.

I have put together a playlist of all these songs here on Spotify. And here also is a playlist of readers’ favourites.

So here we go, here are:

The Top 10 Comic Songs of All Time

(in no particular order).

1. Ladies - Flight of the Conchords

Flight of the Conchords appeared in the UK for the first time at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002. I didn’t go to the festival that year, but I remember not long later sitting in the car with John Oliver after football (all the comics used to play together - still do, in fact, though I appear to have been axed from the game for wrongthink), and John was going on and on about how funny they were and that I should get the CD. I did just that and was hooked. I could not stop playing it.  

Flight of the Conchords have since gone onto fame and great things, but for me they hit their peak with that first show and bootlegged CD. An honourable mention goes to the Bus Driver’s Song, but Ladies is my favourite track.

I prefer this Spotify version, but here they are performing it live:

2. Chocolate Salty Balls - Isaac Hayes

I never really got into South Park. More fool me. But Chocolate Salty Balls is superb. I first heard it on a someone’s radio, as I was walking down Oxford and I had to stop to check I had actually heard what I thought I had heard. Couldn’t stop laughing.

Mighty funk (Rick Rubin is producer), brilliantly sung (Isaac Hayes) with words that are funny as fook. I think Trey Parker must be one the greatest comic songwriters alive today. He makes this list twice.

3. Bantam Cock - Jake Thackray

I first discovered Jake Thackray about 25 years ago, and I’ve been obsessive ever since. What a genius that Yorkshireman was: true to his rural roots, self-taught, angry, erudite and incredibly prolific. Perhaps not the funniest on this list, but boy was there a beauty to what he did. Sublimely witty too. Which song to choose though?

I was tempted to go with Lah-Di-Dah, as that’s his most famous and the first I heard. That’s definitely a good starter if you are not familiar with the great man. Sister Josephine is another - so pertinent to today with all the trans stuff.  Last Will and Testament is another beauty.

The one I’ve chosen? Perhaps not musically his best song, but I love it: Bantam Cock.

Here’s Lah-Di-Dah if you want to explore Thackray further, which you should.

4. Goodness Gracious Me - Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren

You wouldn’t be able to do it today, but Goodness Gracious Me has not got a harmful bone in its body. Conceived and produced by George Martin, later of Beatles fame, and written by Dave Lee and Herbert Kretzmer, it is just such a happy song.

Martin was a genius, a genuine genius, who spent much of the 1950s producing comic numbers and kids songs before teaming up with the Beatles. Nellie the Elephant is another one of his. Right Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins another (on another day that or Hole in the Ground would make the cut) . The Gas Man Cometh by Flanders and Swann another. Just fab. Speaking of which …

5. I’m A Gnu - Flanders and Swann

Originally produced by, you guessed it, George Martin - like Trey Parker, he makes this list twice - this was I think Flanders and Swann at their best. The rhythm is just so wonderfully, intrinsically comic. 

I keep composing songs, then suddenly realising I’ve just been copying this one.

6. Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans - Noel Coward

You can’t have a list like this and not include Noel Coward, one of the grandmasters of wordplay. I first heard his most famous song, Mad Dogs and Englishman, as a kid when they played it on the BBC during Wimbledon to fill in time while it was raining. Loved it.

But I’m going to cite Don’t Lets Be Beastly To The Germans as his best, because it’s a bit more esoteric. I sang it once at drama school and was told off by the music teacher, Paul Abrahams, who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and shouldn’t have been let anywhere near students, for not being truthful by singing it. Oh yes I was! I was mesmerized by the lyrical brilliance. 

What’s more, it’s a great song to get a youngster to sing because, technically, (diction and stuff) it’s so difficult. Glad I’ve had the last word on that one. It’s only been eating away at me for 30+ years.

I’d say, more than any other, this was the song that got me started writing comic songs. When I wrote the Upper-Class Rap - that was my debut number - in my 20s, I was listening to Coward and reading PG Wodehouse non-stop. .

There are no recordings of videos of Coward performing it live, sadly. I gather the song got him into a great deal of trouble in 1943 when it was first released. Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the other hand adored it and demanded several encores when he first heard it, but Coward had misjudged the national mood and the BBC soon banned it.

That’s why there are (sadly) no vids of him performing it live.

7. Turn It Off - Book of Mormon

I was late to Book of Mormon. I avoided it because I thought the target was too easy and only came to it after Lockdown. I have since seen it four times and can’t get enough. It’s packed full of brilliance - song after song of genius. For me, the best though, is Turn It Off.

Book of Mormon was written by Robert Lopez, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, but I’m not sure who the main contributors to Turn It Off were. It is my favourite comic song of recent times. I constantly quote it whenever anyone I know starts to get emotional about anything.

Like many great songs from musicals, I’m not sure the audio works by itself. But here it is. The only videos I can find online are am-dram, albeit good am-dram, so I guess you’ll have to wait for the film, or go see the song live.

8. The Only Gay Eskimo - Phil Nichol

There aren’t many great versions of this online. It’s another to be seen live. 

I watched Phil destroy rooms with this song back in the 90s and 00s. I once supported him on a mini-tour of the West Country in 1998, and one gig, in a bar in Torquay to no more than 25 people, I would rank as one of the top 3 most amazing gigs I have ever seen. I doubt Phil even remembers it.

Online the song got credited to Jack Black - one of the attribution crimes of the early internet. Black basically modeled himself on Phil. Never believe what you read online.

Here he is performing it in its early days with his sketch group Corky and the Juicepigs. But the song evolved and got better as Phil did it solo, especially when he would force people in the audience to sing it.

9. Rabbit - Chas and Dave

You might not have expected these two on this list, but I love Chas & Dave: brilliant, prolific and underrated. 

Bet you didn’t know Chas was on bass and Dave on guitar for one of the most famous hiphop tracks of all time - Eminem’s My Name Is. (Eminem sampled it from the Labi Siffré track on “I Got The”, on which Chas & Dave were the session musicians.)

I think my favourite Chas & Dave track is Sling Your Hook, but it’s not the funniest, so we will go with the first track of theirs I ever heard, which is Rabbit. 

I heard it in this Courage Best ad in around about 1980. It did the 1980 equivalent of going viral. God, I loved that ad. Couldn’t wait for it to come on the telly. The way the two of them sing together and against each other is just so clever.

I once played Romeo and Chas’s wife, Joan Hodges, plyed the Nurse. So Chas saw me onstage. And he was very nice about my performance too. 

My main recollection was  how much larger than life he was. He seemed to fill all those around him with confidence.

10. Gilbert and Sullivan.

This pair are probably the greatest of the lost. So many brilliantly funny songs and ingenious rhymes from a time long before online thesauruses and Rhymezone. Few today realise just how funny their songs are because they are performed so badly. 

Opera singers shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near G&S. They are too used to singing in Italian and other foreign languages, which nobody understands, so they are used to nobody listening to the words, and that informs the way they sing. G&S are all about the words.

Bizarrely, one of the best productions of G&S I ever saw was an all-male production of Iolanthe - very camp - directed by Sasha Regan at the Greenwich Theatre. They got the essence of it perfectly. 

As with Book of Mormon, G&S are best seen live. Musicals work better seen, not heard, I’ve learned. Too much gets lost when it’s audio only.

But which song to choose? Here are five of my favourites. (They are all on this playlist). 

• The Nightmare Song from Iolanthe

• When the Foeman Bears His Steel from the Pirates of Penzance

• A More Humane Mikado from the Mikado

• A Policeman’s Lot from the Pirates of Penzance

• When All Night Long from Iolanthe.

If anyone reading this is thinking of doing some G&S let me put my hand up and say I’m available.

Honourable Mentions To

Gordon is a Moron - Jilted John

Graham Fellows for one of the anthems of my childhood, Gordon is a Moron, which, in 1978, single-handedly destroyed the life of anyone whose name was Gordon. Here it is on Top of the Pops with the added bonus of a Jimmy Savile intro (!)

Don’t Bogart That Joint - Fraternity of Man

I remember listening to this as a stoner at university and thinking it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. Really, it’s just a one-joke wonder, but I mention it to honour my 19-year-old self.

Baby Its Cold Outside - Ray Charles and Betty Carter

How many songs do you remember exactly when you first heard them? My then flatmate Brian played this on Christmas morning, 1994, and I was bowled over by it. Ray Charles and Betty Carter’s version is my far and away the best rendition of this Frank Loesser classic, closely followed by Dominic Frisby and Vanity Von Glow performing the song with no rehearsal at the 2019 Comedy Unleashed Christmas special.

Who is the best musical comic working today?

I try and watch as much musical comedy as I can, but there are bound to be people I’ve missed. My two favourites of recent times though are Jazz Emu and Spencer Jones. Go check them out. 

And, of course, if you want to come and see me, the dates of my spring tour are below.

Thanks very much for reading this. 

I hope you enjoy being a subscriber to Dominic Frisby Comedy News. Hopefully see you at one of the gigs.

Until next time,

Dominic

Here are those dates:

• London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wed March 20 - SOLD OUT. Extra dates added.

• Bordon, Hampshire. Saturday March 23. On sale now.

• Guildford, Surrey. Friday April 5. On sale now.  

• Bath, Somerset. Saturday April 6. On sale now.

• Southend, Essex . Sunday April 14. On sale now.

• London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Wednesday Sept 11 (book early will sell out)

• London, Crazy Coqs, W1. Thur Nov 14 (book early will sell out)

  

* probably not true
** also probably not true