Music » Comedy Music

Thirty years young, Bill Cosby's debut album makes its first appearance on compact disc. It contains the routine that put him on the map, his three-part telling of the story of Noah.
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Media Type: CD
Artist: COSBY,BILL
Title: IS A VERY FUNNY FELLOW RIGHT?
Street Release Date: 01/24/1995
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY

In the wake of the '80s comedy boom that made casual obscenity and bodily functions safe for TV, a listen to these '50s classics from a piano-playing Harvard grad student with a thin singing voice sounds tame if not quaint. Yet Lehrer's first two self-produced albums, among the first generation of comedy LPs, remain beloved gems of musical parody, and noteworthy for their original success in an era when their topics were strictly taboo for broadcast media. He kids cold war paranoia ("We Will All Go Together When We Go"), sends up then-hip folk revivalists with a cheerful murder ballad ("The Irish Ballad"), and gets laughs out of incest ("Oedipus Rex"), drugs ("The Old Dope Peddler"), and racism ("I Wanna Go Back to Dixie"). Closer to Gilbert & Sullivan (whom he in fact raids for one melody) than Def Comedy Jams, Lehrer can still raise a modern frisson when he plays necrophilia as romance ("I hold your hand in mine dear, I press it to my lips/ I take a healthy bite from your dainty fingertips..."). --Sam Sutherland

Harvard-educated mathematician by trade and sociopolitical humorist and satirist by avocation, ivory tickler Tom Lehrer sang irreverent ditties that both outraged and delighted listeners during his on-again, off-again heyday of public performance in the late 1950s through the 1970s. Perhaps best known for his "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," Lehrer combined razor-sharp wit with dry delivery inspired by everything from vaudeville and ragtime to whimsical show tunes and faux folk. Though a tad dated, Lehrer's wickedly pointed That Was the Year That Was is as good a representation of the mid-'60s American social and political climate as any. Recorded live in 1965 and composed largely of songs from the contemporaneous NBC series That Was the Week That Was, the album takes on boho Americana ("The Folk Song Army"), censorship ("Smut"), and the atomic bomb ("Who's Next"). Devilishly funny as well are the outstanding "Vatican Rag" and the puzzle that is "New Math." --Paige La Grone

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No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: CLOWER,JERRY
Title: GREATEST HITS
Street Release Date: 04/26/1994
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY

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No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: MILLER,ROGER
Title: ALL TIME GREATEST HITS
Street Release Date: 04/22/2003
Domestic
Genre: COUNTRY

Taken from a 1982 concert film, this CD contains several solid routines by the veteran comedian. Most of these portrayals are humorous takes on family life. Cosby gives special attention to the messiness and frustrations of child rearing. His caricatures of domestic situations reveal a sharp eye for telling details that most listeners will recognize. Cosby pens the material himself and it's tightly written stuff, indeed. "The Dentist" perfectly captures the humiliation and absurdity of a visit to the tooth doctor. "Chocolate Cake for Breakfast" might be the only flop here. The comic's drawn-out performance is heavy-handed and everything gets a little too spelled-out. But for the most part this disc features Cosby in good form. The man is the embodiment of All-American humor and this album reflects that. --Fred Cisterna

This collection gathers 19 of Sherman's humorous story-songs. The comic uses original lyrics and pre-existing tunes to poke fun at television shows and consumer items, to send-up the kids and generally riff on early and mid-'60s American pop culture. On tracks like "Pop Hates the Beatles" and "Crazy Downtown," his subject is the generation gap. "Al 'n Yetta" portrays a TV-dependent couple while "Lotsa Luck" describes the complicated hassles of dealing with faulty TVs and new-fangled tape recorders. Sherman assumed his audience had a little knowledge of history, too. On "Good Advice" and "You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie," he sings about inventors and French history, respectively. It's hard to imagine contemporary comedians working the historical beat. "One Hippopatami" is a delightfully goofy festival of wordplay that requires only a love of language and a tolerance for schmaltz. --Fred Cisterna

A good, inexpensive single-disc compilation of Rundgren singles may not be what the world's been waiting for, but it's a fine thing nonetheless. Largely avoiding the big pretensions of many of his post-Something/Anything? albums, this record distills 15 years of releases into a hits-just-keep-on-coming set which makes sense of the sensibility that produced the bemusedly soulful "Hello It's Me," the straightforwardly sweet "Dream Goes On Forever," and the outright goofy "Bang the Drum All Day." --Rickey Wright

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No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: MARTIN,STEVE
Title: WILD & CRAZY GUY
Street Release Date: 07/18/1989
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY

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