Title of the post

As you may have noticed, music is one of the greatest loves of my life. For those of you that don’t already know, I also have a profound relationship with comedy. And there’s one other thing: I’m having a serious love affair with musical comedy. Here are four of my recent trysts.


I saw Tim Minchin for the first time a month ago in New York, where he had a six-week run at New World Stages. The man is a genius, if a bit mad. He is a talented pianist and witty as all hell, and I was hurting from laughing by the end of the show. His style is often dark and vulgar, but he performs with such eagerness that it’s difficult to be offended.

You Grew On Me - Tim Minchin
Inflatable You - Tim Minchin


After the show, we walked down to the UCBT (Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre) and saw Olde English’s variety show, Very Fresh, where they debuted a brilliantly made video, “Akon Calls T-Pain”. If you’ve ever heard a song by either of them and thought, “I can appreciate this very original music and the artist’s clever use of vocoder,” this is not the video for you.



(The three songs parodied are “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain, “I Wanna Fuck You” by Akon, and “Sexual Eruption” by Snoop Dogg.)


Improv Everywhere is a project headed by Charlie Todd (or Agent Todd, in IE terms) that he started with fellow comedy students of the UCBT improv school. (Todd now performs and teaches there.) Their goal is to “cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, which they have been doing since August 2001 with over 70 missions. One of their recent missions, executed in Los Angeles, struck me as particularly great.

I’ve been known to have a slight problem with suspension of disbelief. I walked out of “Superman Returns” because I found it so implausible that Lois Lane did not die in the opening scene that I physically couldn’t sit through the rest of the film without shouting obscenities at the screen. So I definitely understand the problem many play- and movie-goers have with musicals. Strangers shouldn’t be able to effortlessly harmonize after breaking into song about something that, let’s face it, doesn’t deserve to be sung about. Like, say, spilled lemonade:




A bit closer to home, I managed to get a taste of musical comedy on campus at the latest Mixed Company a cappella concert. They invited the Johns Hopkins Mental Notes, and both featured a comedy song; Mixed Company sang “Title of the Song” by Da Vinci’s Notebook, and the Mental Notes sang “Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor)” by former Da Vinci’s Notebook members Paul and Storm.

Title of the Song - Da Vinci’s Notebook
Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor) - Paul and Storm

I wish I had a recording of the performance to share-- the soloists, Nemo Swift ’11 of Swarthmore and Tom Murphy ’09 of JHU, did a wonderful job. But the real beauty of these songs is in the lyrics. I’ll leave you with verse two of “Your Love Is”:

My love is a sailing ship
Seeking out a friendly shore
To cast out my anchor, happily never to sail no more.
And your love is the ocean that drowns me
Leaving my bones to be picked at by crabs
And bringing settlers to the New World with smallpox and influenza
And wiping out the indigenous population.
Smallpox
Your love is smallpox.