It is a truism, among those who study humor, that the key to making people laugh is surprise. To tell a joke, you cause people to expect one thing, then make them reframe their assumptions to understand the punchline. You don’t tell the same stories over and over to the same people unless you’re a jerk and a bore, because once people know what to expect, they won’t laugh.

It is a truism of the music business that great music (or even just profitable music) is that which people want to listen to again and again: that favorite albums are chosen on the 30th listen, not the 1st or the 3rd. The two facts, taken together, seem to imply that songs should not foreground anything funny; and indeed, I’ve heard serious music fans argue just that. It’s easy to find examples that back their point; my current example is Liam Lynch’s Fake Songs, from which I can report that any insight I thought I’d detected in his novelty single “United States of Whatever” was probably a trick of the light. Quality isn’t the issue: Liam obviously loves rock music and pop culture enough to study them carefully, and his 2-minute imitations tend to be spot-on, from the 70's cretin-rock of “Rock’n’Roll Whorre” and the falsetto soul of “Sugar Walkin’”, through the redneck evangelism of “Electrician’s Day”, to the scarily accurate “Fake Depeche Mode Song”, “Fake David Bowie Song”, and even “Fake Bjork Song” (yes, Liam can do her vocals). The problem is that once the surprise value of his imitations wears off, we’re left with empty shells: if Bjork or David Bowie wrote songs with only the goal of “hey, let’s toss out something that sounds like Bjork or David Bowie again”, they’d’ve sucked. I wouldn’t respect a Depeche song that chorused “Miserable life (devotion!)/ Miserable life (emotion!)/ Miserable life (obsession!)/ Miserable life (depression!)”. When I do respect Depeche Mode, it’s in part because they care enough to try and _do_ things with these themes. Evoking them for a laugh works wonderfully: once. Then I'm left with bad Depeche Mode.

The problem with this highfalutin’ logic, of course, is that there’s too much it doesn’t account for. Some of the smartest, most literary people I know have watched Wayne’s World fifty times: I think we can assume the surprise laughter is gone, given that they say the best lines along with the characters. Some of the most brilliant, talented, irresistibly sexy people I know are loyal They Might Be Giants fans (I’m thinking of my wife and I here), even though we already know that the train conductor’s face is a paper-white mask of evil and that we could never sleep our way to the top because the alarm clock always wakes us right up. Something, obviously, can make a joke precious even when it isn’t funny anymore, and I think I’ve worked out what that something is.

Let’s use, as a first illustration, my favorite song title in the world: “Whatever Happened to the People with Chairs Up Their Noses?”, by Antediluvian Rocking Horse (an okayish techno band). It is not great merely because the image of a chair up someone’s nose is funny, although it is, especially when you pause and try to figure out what that would look like (what kind of chair? What size? Jammed into the nostrils, or hanging most of the way out as a fashion statement? Is any corrective surgery required on the noses themselves?). It has further levels:

-- It assumes that having a chair up your nose is an identifier, branding you as a part of a group, rather than simply something you’d do briefly as, say, part of your morning routine.

-- It assumes that people with chairs up their noses are a widely recognized category, like soccer moms or recent college graduates or lesbian terrorists.

-- It implies that having a chair up one’s nose is, in fact, admirable, and that the sharply diminished numbers of people with chairs up their noses is a cause for concern.

In short, the title creates a world where there is nothing even remotely odd about the title “Whatever Happened to the People with Chairs Up Their Noses?”. Which is not only funny, but is also clearly a better world than ours. The joke creates a falsehood that deserves to be a truth, and that is what does not wear out.

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We can see how this applies to Wayne’s World. Obviously, in a better world, friendly morons can make quality television in their basements on the cheap, and not be overwhelmed by calculating morons with $20 million national focus groups. Obviously, learning Chinese should take roughly 15 seconds, and can lead anyone to speak profoundly in the same way that recovering from fractured fingers should cause anyone to start playing the piano well. There should be enough pretty girls for all the nice boys, and whenever a bunch of things go wrong, we should be able to step in and re-run the last day until it goes right. Just as clearly, They Might Be Giants’ sillier songs conjure a world where famous Belgian painters don’t stop being friendly and personable just because they’re dead, science class can be reduced to the memorization of happy tunes, and not only do we all remember who the 11th president of the United States was, but he was an unambiguous hero. The TV’s in Esperanto’s sometimes, and you know how that’s a biitch, but even that’s interesting, so we should like it there.

(People who don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention They Might Be Giants really need to rush out and buy either the absurdly ramshackle Lincoln, the peppy Flood, the diverse and rocking John Henry, or the poppy New Wave Factory Showroom right now, so I can keep using them as shorthand to make points.)

Another band that attempts this trick is King Missile, whom you might know for their 1992 alterna-hit “Detachable Penis”. Over thick, heavily tremolo’d guitar and detached backup singing, John S. Hall speaks, in a dazed and nebbishy but friendly voice, about the ways that having a detachable penis affects his daily life. He loses it at a party, looks in the medicine cabinet where he often leaves it, ends up having to search around and call in assistance: the song works because, granting that Hall’s narrator is unusual in having a detachable penis, he and his friends have long since learned to treat it as normal. (And guys gotta admit it would be helpful, being able to shelve the penis to reduce injury risk in sports events, or erection risk at church.)

Several other songs on that album, Happy Hour, achieve a similar sort of merit in different ways. “Martin Scorcese” supposes that we can best love someone by imitating them: “If I ever meet him, I'm gonna grab his f---ing neck and just shake him and say ‘Thank you. Thank you for making such excellent f---ing movies!’ Then I'd twist his nose all the way the f--- around and then rip off one of his ears and throw it like a f---ing frisbee!”. “It’s Saturday” would do away with an annoying paradox: “I want to be a part of the different crowd, and assert my individuality along with others who are different like me”. “Ed”, meanwhile – as spectacular a shaggy-dog story as has ever been told by anyone – paints a world in which happiness can be created simply by following random chains of doubtful logic until one of them stumbles onto proof that “nothing is better than this”. Of course, it also wins points for awarding Ed possession of what an Artforum article deemed “the Three Most Insignificant Paintings of Mark Rothko”.

Until this year, Happy Hour probably stood as King Missile’s masterpiece, but despite its well-crafted layers of psyechedelic guitar-rock and John’s ingratiating voice, it had problems. “Ed” itself was at the core: in a massive failure of confidence in one of the most durable funny (because more-than-funny) short stories ever written, the vocals are recorded too low to understand well, even with effort and practice. Also, I’m not the biggest fan of thick guitar sounds. So I was ready to appreciate the formation of King Missile III, a more diverse and experimental group with drums, cello, and trumpet up front. Failure, their 1998 debut, was strange and interesting and diverse, but it lacked a center: most of the gags felt, to me, like gags. For better or worse, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life builds us a new world. Perhaps if I’d stumbled on it with no experience of John S. Hall, I’d have hated it like PacManY2J did -- though the sly album title, and seeing John listed with “Esq.” after his name as the band’s legal co-counsel, would probably have tipped me off that any dumb-looking bits shouldn’t be taken at face value. As is, though, tipoffs were never an issue, and Psychopathology has become my new favorite King Missile album.

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The relaxed Latin groove and vibraphones of “My Father” support an ideal opening track: John reminisces, like a dorky stranger buying your drinks at a bar, about his Dad’s exciting life. “He was the first white man to play in the Negro Leagues; I think he was with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but then he was traded to the Kansas City Monarchs for Jackie Robinson or something”, John reasons. I think we can agree that the Negro Leagues deserved something better than to have their best ballplayers kidnapped off the plantation without even an auction price, so yes, this should have happened. “In 1965, he came to America with just a few dollars and started the Hari Krishna religion”, Hall continues, and granting that Hall’s Dad had already retired from American baseball a decade earlier, what the hell business is it of Father Time’s to keep His children from starting over however they want?

“He always used to say to me, ‘Son, Lyndon Johnson has always been made out of clothespins, but Eisenhower was a canteloupe and only now is he an Episcopalian; nothing short of sausages and funnels for as long as you both shall live!’ He never explained this to me entirely. He never had to”. I suppose it would admit too much to say that I sometimes talk like that. Let’s settle for simply agreeing that fathers and sons should always be able to understand each other like that, and that if the Democrats nominate a canteloupe in 2004 we should all go vote for it and be glad it’s not Bill Clinton (who was an abstract sculpture built from gum and dead mealworms, the way I recall it).

I think PacManY2J was already starting to worry about this disc by the time “My Father” ended, though; there is the short excerpt from his Dad’s play, a Bill and Ted Find Silly Excuses to Mention Technical Terms for Private Body Parts sort of thing. Then comes the first of five “Pain Poems”. If I promise you that (“Martin Scorcese” aside) King Missile’s prior albums include virtually no cuss words of any kind, it should be possible to appreciate the Pain Poems as they are introduced, as they develop, as they offer chances to compare and contrast (the abrupt spill of “Hot Coffee” as opposed to “Paper Cut” or “Cold Pool”). It should be possible to understand them as a multilayered satire – on poetry recitals, on the devaluation of swear words with overuse, on the way that people with few real problems have never been short of ways to get mad at fake ones – as well as an expression of the sheer joy of being able to yell naughty words and get paid for it. On the other hand, if you assumed Hall always talked like that, and you didn’t notice the irony provided by his gentle little introductions, you might just figure he was stupid. So: he doesn’t, and he isn’t. Now you know.

Swearing does come up again in the album, mind you. It’s in the moronic shouts over the percussive jazz of “Damned if I Know”. It’s in his amazingly intense tribute to “the President”. It’s in his gently informative lecture over the soft hymnal piano of “the Miracle of Childbirth”, and I can’t imagine how you’d communicate the ideas without cussing. “On the day that you were conceived, your father was in bed with your mother, and your father got a hard-on, and they f---ed”, he begins truthfully, and the track develops with careful logic as he distinguishes between what we can speculate about your conception, and what we can actually know. We need the intensifying gypsy violin and the light piano pounding and the imagined scene of your father saying “Get ready, biitch, here I come” and your mother saying “Oh daddy! Come in me! Come in me!” (“Or maybe they were quiet”) – else what’s interesting about his noting that “To some, this process is proof that there is a God”, or his urging that you keep these images in mind the next time that you’re having sex? The dainty counterpoint of his sung falsetto “F--- me! F--- me!”s and his goofy baritone “Here I come”s at the end is just music, happy baroque for the jaded rockers among us.

But swearing is – as Hall I think clearly agrees – hardly the most durable way to be interesting. He even writes “Ennui” about larger problems: in a stuffy British-accented Percy Dovetonsils voice, he grants that even castration and vomit-eating and necrophilia are losing their charm, and admits that “I’ve done bad things with relish, and good things with pickles”. Of course, “Eating People” immediately discusses cannibalism with the album’s perkiest, most tuneful chorus on finger-snaps, synth pads, and simple drum machine. He doesn’t endorse cannibalism, exactly, just analyzes it on politeness grounds, with a rigor I don’t think you could challenge even if one of his bandmates didn’t sound like Kermit the Frog on backup vocals. “Jim”, over urban background white-noise, has us eavesdropping as John invents (or pretends to invent) a character on the spot, warning us from the start that the character will die by the time the 4-minute track ends. Then John makes Jim likeable and important anyway, inventing traits and a social circle for him with total self-consciousness (“Would you like to know what Jim does for a living? So would I. Let’s see…”). That said, the death is truly spectacular.

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It’s true that the album’s music is usually pretty interesting: the clip-clop drum machine and whistle-able tunes and defective synths on “Hamsters”, the cute little percussion and vibes and sound-effects behind the peppy piano of “Domestic Life”, the walloping distorted bass of “Chickens”, the wind-up bells and chimes of “JLH”, the amateur but merciless drumkit molestation of “the President”. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a release by the great avant-garde Knitting Factory label, after all. But the words are at the center, and the words are (and have to be) durable.

And indeed, keeping with my premise, the words build worlds. John S. Hall’s is a world where you can be a God and never be bored, because your creations don’t bother to put up with your shiit. It’s a world where anything you think of can come true, and anything that can come true can be analyzed into sensible bits and pieces. It’s a world where those bits and pieces can be stomped into bloody pulp, and it won’t matter because they can be reconstituted. It’s a world where hamsters are much more useful than they are here, if you obey a few basic ground rules.

Interestingly, Psychopathology is not an amoral album. “Give Me a Dollar”, despite the title, cuts through the moral dilemma of charity more sensibly, and kindly, in three minutes than Nick Hornby’s novel How to be Good did in three hundred pages (and I liked How to be Good). “Damned if I Know” challenges those of who are comfortable to remember everyone who isn’t, even as it pretends the opposite. “Jim” makes more sense if we believe in volunteering for good causes, and even taken at face value, “Eating People”’s moral reasoning makes more sense if John is a vegetarian. “The President” builds to “F-- Congress for sucking your dick, and f--- everyone who puts up with it, including me/ F--- me for not killing you/ F--- everyone who’s gotten within 15 f---ing feet of you and hasn’t f---ing tried”, and on one level that’s sort of embarrassing, but on another it’s profound. Bush has exactly the same claim to office that Adolf Hitler did (having almost but not quite won their elections, both were elevated to power by men immune to elections). Where do those of us who hate him get off, putting on sinister German accents to say “Just folloving orders”?

But even in this moral challenge, Hall is getting paid to cuss. In a better world, we could too. In the meantime, let’s at least all help him get paid well. It’s the right thing to do.

Recommended: Yes