Comedy songs get a bad rap. No, wait, that’s not entirely true; comedy songs probably get the rap they deserve considering the amount of terrible comedy songs there are in the world. But not all comedy songs are terrible, is my point, and for every Weird Al parody of the hit song of the day that replaces one of the word with “fat” or whatever, there’s also a funny and well-constructed and -performed songs that are worth listening to. From that world, there’s Nellie McKay and “Bodega!” from her last (I think? I admit, I haven’t been paying the most attention to her career in recent years) album, Home Sweet Mobile Home. It’s clearly a comedy song – Anything that includes the passage “When love fills the air/And he asks me/’When will you be mine?’/I sigh, ‘My Valentine/Proposed to me in a bodega'” is clearly not entirely serious – but there’s a fun to it that’s infectious, and a tongue-in-cheek intelligence at play in the parodic elements, detourning expectations of what to expect in the song as it merrily rolls along. While it’s true that not every comedy record is the Rutles, Nellie’s a good enough substitute for me, thanks very much.
Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan