I grew up listening to comedy albums. I listened to them enough to have some comedian’s routines memorized. It would be hard to not be influenced by some of these routines even when they weren’t the most spiritual stories. Here are three songs that I can site direct influences from comedy routines.
IT’S GONNA RAIN
This song tells the story of Noah and the flood. The verses of the song are the voices of Noah’s neighbors. They ask him questions about what he’s doing. As I do with a lot of my religious music that tell stories, I retell the story from the viewpoint of someone in the story that we don’t hear from in the Bible. In this song, they ask all the questions that we would like to ask. So, it should come as no surprise that this song is influenced by the Noah routines that Bill Cosby performed on his first album, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow…Right! I have told audiences that this song may be more influenced by Bill Cosby than the writer of Genesis. In my song, the response of Noah gives to the question is “It’s Gonna Rain” instead of “How long can you tread water?”
SPEAKING IN TONGUES
While this song deals with how we use “churchspeak” instead of language that non-Christians understand, the song is directly inspired by part of “The Faith Healer” routine by Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber on their album In One Head And Out The Other The New Emerging Bigot. In this routine, Jack Burns is the faith healer. Avery Schreiber portrays a series of people wanting to be healed. Burns typically asked the unfortunate soul a series of questions about their faith as he lays hands on them. He asks them “Do you believe?” and “Do you go to church every Sunday?” One of the people that is not familiar with Christian traditions and phrases is asked “Have you been washed in the blood of the lamb?” to which Schreiber replies “I can’t even imagine!” Burns assures him with the words “Don’t worry, we don’t do it. It just sounds good.” This routine made it into the first line of my song:
“What will they think when you tell them that you have been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”
The second line of the song is inspired by David Steinberg’s Moses routine on his album Disguised as a Normal Person. In part of this routine, he tells the story of Moses and the burning bush. When Moses is being sent to tell Pharaoh to let his people go, He tells that Moses asks, “Who shall I say sent me?” God replies, “Whom? I AM THAT I AM!” Moses sarcastically replies, “Thanks for clearing that up.”
JUST BE LIKE CHRIST
I noticed the influence after I had written this song. The song lists traits of Jesus that we should model. After I completed writing this song, I noticed that it bears some similarities to Steve Martin’s Grandmother Song. This song can be found on his Let’s Get Small album. This song is supposedly one that his grandmother sang to him when he was growing up. Here are the first two verses:
“Be courteous, kind and forgiving
Be gentle and peaceful each day
Be warm and human and grateful
And have a good thing to say
Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike
Be witty and happy and wise
Be honest and love all your neighbors
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant”
Steve Martin
It becomes a list of silly things to do and be including encouragement to “Put a live chicken in you underwear”. One of the reasons I am a big Steve Martin fan.