"Serious" Songs that make you laugh. -

[Dave.]

Any uber serious cover of a pop song they throw on movie trailer.

 

[Michael Jacks0n]

They tried so hard to make it epic and hip, They have Johnny Cash Narrating the story and Johnny now rides a skateboard.

I discovered this originally on Beavis & Butthead when I was a kid. The boys riff on the absurdity of this song, but they seem to like Cash!

"That dude on the hill's pretty cool."
"Yeah, I bet he could kick all these guys' asses."

 

[Lemming0448]

My brother has this song in his main playlist. Whenever it comes on, I just laugh on the inside.

 

[Weeb Slinger]

The outsider art genre of the song poem (essentially the heartfelt thoughts of eccentric individuals, who paid to have their amateur verse set to music and recorded) is fertile ground for unintended hilarity.

I enjoy the stately Memphis soul of 'Jimmy Carter Says Yes' performed by Gene Marshall, who seeds the spoken word interludes with a gravitas that was lacking in the 39th president.

I also recommend 'I Like Yellow Things' performed by Bobbi Blake, which is, predictably, a country music song listing random yellow objects.

 

[Spunt]

This one's running neck and neck with Extreme'a More Than Words for most unintentionally homosexual video of all time.

Gary and Nuno look like two gay lovers serenading each other. Even as a ten year old child I knew this was the gayest thing I had ever seen on TV. If they were sitting any closer together their dicks would be in each other's mouths. Nuno keeps flipping his hair and Gary keeps making O faces.

Bear in mind this song was super popular and MTV played it all the damn time.

Nuno also drunk posted his own nudes on Instagram a couple years back but quickly deleted them.

Another thing I find entertaining about this song is that about 30 seconds from the end, Nuno realises that he hasn't done a lightning-fast guitar solo yet, and puts in possibly the most inappropriate and out-of-nowhere super-fast guitar solo in history in at the end of the track and it sounds so fucking stupid.

Note that this guitar solo is NOT in the music video, which says a lot. It's in the original studio version and the one that got radio play:

You can tell how this went down in the rehearsal room.

Gary: Cool, guys, I think that's a pretty good song now. Let's go record it.
Nuno: Woah, woah, woah, it's not finished yet!
Gary: What?
Nuno: There's no guitar solo!
Entire band: [groans]
Nuno: It's not an Extreme song without one of my guitar solos! How am I going to pick up chicks without a guitar solo! It's in my contract! Guitar solo every song!
Gary: Nuno, it's a fucking acoustic ballad. There aren't even any drums. There is nowhere for one of your spastic guitar solos anywhere in the song.
Nuno: I get a guitar solo or I don't record the song!
Gary: [sigh]. Fine. You get 20 seconds at the end or whatever.
Nuno: Yaaaaay!
Gary: Faggot.
Producer: Don't worry we'll edit it out later.

I disagree about More Than Words being the most unintentionally gay music video ever, not when this exists:

Never in human history have five men tried so hard to look so heterosexual and failed so badly. But what makes this video a real winner is the keyboard player. I didn't really notice him at first, and maybe you didn't. BUT LOOK AT THE FUCKING KEYBOARD PLAYER. ACTUALLY WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LOOK AT THE KEYBOARD PLAYER. I've never seen someone look so out of place in a band. It looks like they hired Chris Chan to play piano. He didn't even bother to get a leather jacket for their career-defining music single video. For a band who clearly care so much about their image, how does he get away with it, or even get in the band? Maybe he was the only one who knew how to plug the instruments in.

Any uber serious cover of a pop song they throw on movie trailer.

The reason you get horrible covers of well-known songs in movie trailers (and advertising in general) is because covering a song involves a one-off licence payment to the owner of the publishing rights (publishing or "print" royalties cover the sheet music and lyrics of a song, basically the "idea" of the song, but not any particular recording of it). If they used the original recording they would have to pay performance royalties as well to the original musicians on the recording, and that can be due each and every time the advert or trailer airs (on TV, for online it's handled differently but is still very expensive). Whereas with a cover they can (under)pay some nobody music producer to shit out a terrible cover in an afternoon and use their leverage to make them waive their performance royalties. Basically it's done to save money.

To give you some idea of how expensive music licensing can be, Kevin Smith said he wanted to put an Alice in Chains song in the background of a scene in Clerks, but found out that the licensing and royalties would add up to ten times the film's entire budget. Clerks was shot on a budget of about $26,000 so that meant that AIC's record company wanted to charge an unknown indie film director over a quarter of a million dollars to feature a few seconds of a song - you can only imagine what they charge Disney or whoever to have a song in a blockbuster.

 

[sadbird]

finally, my time has come

 

[Solid Snek]

My brother has this song in his main playlist. Whenever it comes on, I just laugh on the inside.

Oooh, that's a real song? I guess it had to be, but I guess I always just thought it was a Nightcore thing.

finally, my time has come

This is amazing, thank you.


Serious songs that make me laugh:

(just about any country song, really)

 

[Radical Cadre]

I really like this song but some of the lyrics make me laugh. Especially "God in heaven teach me how to die!"

 

[SuzukiToyota]

 

[Spunt]

On a similar note:

I like this version:

 

[Autistic AT-ST]

any remotely good Alt rock song that is ruined with insane amounts of childish temper tantrums/screamo on the mic.

 

[McMitch4kf]

I disagree about More Than Words being the most unintentionally gay music video ever, not when this exists:

Never in human history have five men tried so hard to look so heterosexual and failed so badly. But what makes this video a real winner is the keyboard player. I didn't really notice him at first, and maybe you didn't. BUT LOOK AT THE FUCKING KEYBOARD PLAYER. ACTUALLY WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LOOK AT THE KEYBOARD PLAYER. I've never seen someone look so out of place in a band. It looks like they hired Chris Chan to play piano. He didn't even bother to get a leather jacket for their career-defining music single video. For a band who clearly care so much about their image, how does he get away with it, or even get in the band? Maybe he was the only one who knew how to plug the instruments in.

The reason the keyboardist looks out of place is two-fold; 1) he wrote the song and every other hit the band had, and was essentially printing them money, and 2) if it actually became an issue, he could quit the band and return to his massive pile of money from writing hits for other bands while he was also writing hits for Survivor (which is what happened after a while).
The general rule of thumb is that if a member of the band puts no effort into maintaining a coop image, but seems to be tolerated anyway, then that member is the moneymaker.

 

[Spunt]

The reason the keyboardist looks out of place is two-fold; 1) he wrote the song and every other hit the band had, and was essentially printing them money, and 2) if it actually became an issue, he could quit the band and return to his massive pile of money from writing hits for other bands while he was also writing hits for Survivor (which is what happened after a while).
The general rule of thumb is that if a member of the band puts no effort into maintaining a coop image, but seems to be tolerated anyway, then that member is the moneymaker.

Ah, I thought so - at one point in the video he seems to actually be teaching the guitarist how to play the song. Maybe he insisted that be in there too just to rub it in.

 

[The Great Citracett]

Ah, I thought so - at one point in the video he seems to actually be teaching the guitarist how to play the song. Maybe he insisted that be in there too just to rub it in.

Jim Peterik is also a lead singer and guitarist, best known outside Survivor for this 1970 classic:

And also for having the same glasses for decades.