Humour and Parody

Humourous songs often parody a traditional tune or song with a lyric that satirizes something or is simply created to make us laugh.

Popular culture sometimes creates pastiches of folk music for its own ends. One famous example is the pseudo-ballad sung about brave Sir Robin in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Enthusiasts for folk music might properly consider this song to be pastiche and not parody, because the tune is pleasant and far from inept, and the topic being lampooned is not balladry but the medieval heroic tradition.

The arch-shaped melodic form of this song (first and last lines low in pitch, middle lines high) is characteristic of traditional English folk music. A more recent similarly incisive send-up of folk music, this time American in origin, is the film A Mighty Wind by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy.

Benny Hill and Jasper Carrot among others often parodied traditional  tunes to get a laugh. The contrast between a stirring melody with a serious message and the ridiculous tales they told in their lyrics seemed to make their songs even funnier.

Another instance of pastiche is the notoriously well-known theme song for the television show Gilligan's Island (music by George Wyle, lyrics by Sherwood Schwartz). This tune is also folk-like in character, and in fact is written in a traditional folk mode (modes are a type of musical scale); the mode of "Gilligan's Island" is ambiguous between Dorian and Aeolian.

The lyrics begin with the traditional folk device in which the singer invites his hearers to listen to the tale that follows. Moreover, two of the stanzas repeat the final short line, a common device in English folk stanzas. However, the raising of the key by a semitone with each new verse is an unmistakable trait of commercial music and rarely occurred in the original folk tradition.

Folk music is easy to parody because it is, at present, a popular music genre that relies on a traditional music genre. As such, it is likely to lack the sophistication and glamour that attach to other forms of popular music.

Folk music satire ranges from the worst excesses of Rambling Syd Rumpo and Bill Oddie to the deft and subtle artistry of Sid Kipper, Eric Idle, and Tom Lehrer. Even "serious" folk musicians are not averse to poking fun at the form from time to time, for example Martin Carthy's devastating rendition of "All the Hard Cheese of Old England" (written by Les Barker), to the tune of "All the Hard Times of Old England", Robb Johnson's "Lack of Jolly Ploughboy", and more recently "I'm Sending an E-mail to Santa" by the Yorkshire-based harmony group Artisan.

Other musicians have been known to take the tune of a traditional folk song and add their own words, often humorous, or on a similar-sounding yet different subject; these include The Wurzels, The Incredible Dr. Busker and The Mrs Ackroyd Band.

History of Folk Music 1960s