Lil Dicky, Weird Al, and Funny Rap

I have been compared to Lil Dicky and to Weird Al Yankovic. Those are two very different comparisons and I am happy with both.

I also named a coffee Good Ass Mother Fucking Coffee and built a browser game about defending wildflowers from lawnmowers, so arguing I am a serious artist being unfairly labelled would be a difficult position to hold.

The thing about funny music

Comedy is treated as a lesser category almost everywhere, and it is worth asking why, because the reasoning does not survive contact.

Writing a funny song is harder than writing a sad one. A sad song can be vague and still land — ambiguity reads as depth. A joke either works or it does not, instantly, with no credit for intention. You find out immediately, every time.

Weird Al has been doing this for forty years at a level of technical precision most "serious" artists never reach. His parodies are note-perfect recreations before they are jokes. The craft floor is extremely high and the respect floor was, for a long time, extremely low.

Lil Dicky is the more useful comparison

Weird Al parodies existing songs. Lil Dicky writes original rap that happens to be funny, which is a different and in some ways harder trick — you have to be genuinely good at the thing you are being funny inside of.

And the funny was never the whole of it. The comedy got people in the door, and then there were songs underneath with real writing in them. That is the model I understand.

What the awards actually said

The video for “Sauce That” won five awards at the AI International Music Video Festival in Los Angeles, and two of them were Best Comedy and Best Experimental, from the same jury, on the same afternoon.

That pairing is the whole argument in miniature. Experimental work is usually humourless. Comedy is usually formally conservative — a joke needs a shape the audience recognises. Getting both means the chaos was not an accident and the funny was not a shortcut.

It also won Best Music Video from the jury and from the audience, which rarely happens, because juries and audiences want different things.

Where I actually sit

Funny is a tool, not a genre I live in. Bluebonnet Plague is not a comedy album. It is a record about spending ten years making something nobody asked for, and it has jokes in it, because that is how people actually talk about painful things.

The ones who cannot hold both — who need a song to be funny or serious and not both — are going to find this frustrating. That is fine. The people calling me Eminem coded hear the other half.