Amusing acoustics: how music can bring the mirth in comedy ads

I love music. Check. I like funny stuff. Check. It’s in my blood. Check. My great great uncle played that hectic zany music for silent movies on a jangly piano in a Cape Town cinema. I imagine that was quite funny.

Funny music is rarely funny alone but plays an important supporting role. 

Anyway, let me tell you one of the funniest songs ever written – Fuck you tonight, by The Notorious B.I.G. I always thought it was quite silly (probably because it was so creepy), but then I heard someone with EarPods in, singing it with feeling at a deserted London underground station. That was comedy gold. Although with hindsight, maybe he was serenading me.

It’s hard to do funny. Comedy isn’t easy. Making someone genuinely laugh is as hard as (or harder than) making them cry. Funny music is rarely funny alone but plays an important supporting role. 

 If you can be clever enough to create work that appeals to a broad sense of humour, it will allow your brand to live rent free in people’s minds. 

It often finds its voice in parody. I chuckled away when I first saw the Rustlers ad where two high school crews have a face off, and start chanting, “DANCE, FIGHT! DANCE, FIGHT! DANCE, FIGHT!” before a classic electro hip-hop track kicks in. 

The comedy in this Rustlers ad is enhanced by the cheesy hip-hop and squeaky shoes of the moonwalking dancers.

Many years before, Carlton Draught did an excellent parody of advertising as a whole, with Big Ad, which rewrites Carl Orff’s impossibly dramatic Carmina Burana. A cast of thousands run around in flamboyant costumes singing about how big and expensive the ad is, before concluding “this ad better sell some bloody beer”.

The gravitas of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana provides a comic contrast to the levity of a 'big ad' for beer.

Writing a new song for both serious educational purposes [PSA] and laughs is a risky move. Will it be good enough to cut through when something familiar or famous will have to work less hard? 

This is true, but when you nail it, it’s arguably even more powerful – take Dumb ways to die, a song which is still being sung by kids all over the world fifteen years on from the award-winning Metro Trains PSA. If you can be clever enough to create work that appeals to a broad sense of humour, it will allow your brand to live rent-free in people’s minds. 

Another success story is Just Eat, which landed particularly well with Snoop Dogg’s performances. It was perfectly written to reflect his iconic music style; with every signature sound you could think of. And of course, lyrically it was totally on point too, selling the scope and deliciousness of ordering with them. But of course, this idea would have been spawned deliberately or unknowingly from the humble Just Eat jingle.

Songs that trend on TikTok often end up charting on the Billboard 100 or Spotify Viral 50.

Which is a suspiciously easy segue to jingles. They’re brilliantly silly, if not funny per se. The Old Spice audio sign-off serves as a perfect piece of punctuation at the end of all the nonsense that precedes it. And it’s the thing that stays with you – the shorthand to the brand. 

Context, as ever, is important when you’re trying to elevate humour with your choice of music. It lands perfectly on on a band I follow called Filthy Breakdowns. They promote their very heavy music by playing it over various tumbles, fails, falls, and weirdly, cheerleading. Is it funny? Kind of, although not always. 

It’s not far off my big tip for the next music genre to be used as a comic soundtrack to something – Nu Metal. Anyway, I digress... Yeah

The Filthy Breakdowns' promos sit at the intersection between heavy metal and slapstick humour.

With TikTok, music is integral to many of its most successful trends. It rarely needs to make sense. Sometimes the familiarity and ease of joining in is enough. To know something ridiculous will suddenly look epic juxtaposed with this or that tune. 

In fact, according to a November 2021 study conducted for TikTok, songs that trend on TikTok often end up charting on the Billboard 100 or Spotify Viral 50. And 67 per cent of the app's users are more likely to seek out songs on music-streaming services after hearing them on TikTok. 

When we created our TikTok Veganuary videos for Future Farm, the absurdity of the music was as important as the muscly bull sexy-dancing in the meat aisle or doing press ups in the fridge. It’s also worth noting that the music alone is rarely funny – it’s that teamwork between visuals and sounds.