Comedian Tunes

 

Neil Hamburger the "unfunny" comedian who pushes comedic boundaries in the vein of Kaufman

 
So XM Radio has a quite decent selection of comedy channels, one of which is the newer Comedy Central based one (XM95) which features some slightly fresher material than RawDog (XM99).  Note* I recently edited the "Comedy Central" Wikipedia page to include XM 95 as a source as I'm an official super-user of Wikipedia, and generally awesome.

Larry "Wildman" Fischer, comedic genius.

  I enjoy the channel but XM seems to add a few comedic songs to the list.  Channel 160, Canada's "Laugh Attack"  is particularly guilty of this.  Now we all remember Alfred Matthew "Weird Al" Yankovic's offerings such as "Amish Paradise", "Yoda", and "Eat It", monkeying several pop-star offerings with his own pun-rich goofball lyrics fit for tween-humor.  Good fun.  Still, I find a lot of comedians delve into the hobby of making musical releases, and they shouldn't.  It's usually not good, though sometimes, like Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room" was okay, I just don't feel these comedians should be littering XM stand-up comedic channels with their bold, misplaced attempts.

  A perfect venue for it was Dr. Demento's radio hour which started back in 1972 in Los Angeles, spinning as-old-as 1910's wax-cylinders and 78-rpm comedic tunes that were otherwise lost, such as "Big Rock Candy Mountain" (fairly recently revived in the movie Brother Where Art Thou?) as well as modern, hyper-obscure releases and honoring comedic madman Wild Man Fischer or Emo Philips whom otherwise wouldn't have gotten a leg-up.  I remember listening to Dr. Demento on FM radio (back when people still had that before the evil Clear Channel Communications utterly destroyed FM radio) back in 1981, starting with it's early-era 1960's Dr.Who-like trance-intro, Pico and Sepulveda..  I'd stay up after midnight with my Panasonic Auto-Reverse Cassette and radio player with my foamy headphones and listen for the hour, enduring the Trident chewing gum commercials in-between ("Who likes Trident, I do!")  This was a great venue for the Doctor, and it was all oddball songs from midnight to one AM.  Quirky and hidden, and only on some oddball channel right before sign-off and the National Anthem played (yeah, back in 1981, radio channels (and TV) would sign-off, play the National Anthem, and not broadcast until about 6am or so.)

Weird Al Yankovic on a keytar playing-up the uncool.

  When XM plays these out of nowhere, it's not something I want to hear.  It breaks-up the continuity of the stand-up work and it's out-of-place, unless the comedian specifically ONLY does music, then it's sort of okay.  I'd rather there be a Dr.Demento channel on XM that could handle this stuff.  We should spam-email XM to do this and give Barry Hansen (the Dr.) his due props since his last airing was in 2011.  Let's give him a new home instead of Nowhereville with a 1994 website!  We still love you, Doctor!  Pico and Sepulveda forever!

Comedian Jim Gaffigan in an infinite loop of himself.