Novelty / Comedy / Character Folk

History

The family grows from two older roots braided together: the bawdy-ballad and vaudeville-comedy stage tradition, and the postwar folk revival's appetite for "fun" material. Oscar Brand began issuing his Bawdy Songs & Backroom Ballads volumes in 1949, turning winking off-color folklore into a long-running franchise, while Britain's Michael Flanders and Donald Swann brought drawing-room wit to the same idea with At the Drop of a Hat (recorded 1957). On the American campus circuit, Tom Lehrer weaponized the parlor piano with savage satire, and by the early 1960s the revival's boom made comedy folk genuinely commercial: the Smothers Brothers built a career on Tom's "clueless" sparring over folk standards, and Allan Sherman's 1963 "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" topped the charts as parody. Greenwich Village supplied an irreverent wing too, the jug-band revival of Jim Kweskin and the deliberately unhinged old-time of the Holy Modal Rounders, plus Phil Ochs's sharp topical satire. The 1970s gave novelty crossover hits like Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk," and from 1977 Riders in the Sky revived singing-cowboy comedy, eventually scoring with Pixar. The lane has stayed alive through quirky indie folk and storyteller-comics ever since.

The sub-genre landscape

The family's center of gravity is Comedy Folk, the one fully developed lane and the umbrella under which most of the rest sit. It's the broad case: any folk performance where the laugh, the persona, and the between-song timing carry as much weight as the tune. Everything else here is a more specialized cut of that same cloth.

Closest to the core are the satire and parody branches. Satirical Folk and Political Satire Folk run from Tom Lehrer's piano broadsides through Phil Ochs's topical needling; Parody Folk lives on melody-swapping gags like Allan Sherman's camp letter; and Humor Ballad and Storyteller Comedy Folk cover the long-form comic narrative that the Smothers Brothers and later folk-comics made their stock-in-trade. Novelty Folk and Children's Novelty Folk catch the lighter, hookier crossover hits (Loudon Wainwright's roadkill anthem, kid-aimed singalongs) where the gag is the whole song.

The peripheral spin-offs lean on costume, era, and stagecraft. Jug Band Novelty (Kweskin, the Even Dozen) and Vaudeville Folk reach back to pre-war old-time silliness; Cowboy Comedy Song is essentially Riders in the Sky's singing-cowboy revival; Folk Cabaret and Character Folk foreground theatrical persona; and Quirky Indie Folk is the modern descendant, where deadpan oddballs keep the family's irreverence alive without the vaudeville dress-up. Traced through these lanes, the story runs bawdy stage to revival boom to indie weirdness.

Sub-genres in this family

15 sub-genres · 1 written up

Defining artists

• Tom LehrerSpotifyYouTube
• Allan ShermanSpotifyYouTube
• Flanders and SwannSpotifyYouTube
• Shel SilversteinSpotifyYouTube
• The Smothers BrothersSpotifyYouTube
• Oscar BrandSpotifyYouTube

Essential listening

• Poisoning Pigeons in the Park(1959) — Tom LehrerSpotifyYouTube
• Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)(1963) — Allan ShermanSpotifyYouTube
• A Boy Named Sue(1969) — Shel SilversteinSpotifyYouTube
• The Hippopotamus Song (Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud)(1957) — Flanders and SwannSpotifyYouTube
• Dead Skunk(1972) — Loudon Wainwright IIISpotifyYouTube
• Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads, Vol. 1(1949) — Oscar BrandSpotifyYouTube

Sources

• Wikipedia: Oscar Brand and Oscar Brand discography
• Wikipedia: Tom Lehrer; An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer; The Elements (song)
• Wikipedia and AllMusic: The Smothers Brothers; Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh; Allan Sherman
• Wikipedia: Flanders and Swann; At the Drop of a Hat
• AllMusic and Wikipedia: Jim Kweskin Jug Band; The Holy Modal Rounders
• Wikipedia: Riders in the Sky (band); Dead Skunk; Love Me, I'm a Liberal