Posts Tagged comedy

This is when the [poster] wall comes down

Posted by Angela Brett in Moving to the USA on November 11, 2024


Here’s a video in which I take down my posters in my apartment in Vienna, in order to pack them up to move to the USA. It includes improvised song parodies and silly jokes from Joey Marianer and myself.

I took this video partly to have a record of my poster wall (though I also have a photo of it which I sometimes use as a Zoom background) and partly because if I get permission to do so, I’ll make a music video of Sam Bettens’ song ‘Go’ documenting the entire move, and a sped-up version of this video will be used for the lyric ‘this is when the wall comes down’. For now I’ve just used that one clip of the song, since I suppose it’s short enough to be fair use. Other songs referenced in the video are:

My posters are still in a crate on a truck somewhere between Montréal and here, so my home office currently only has a map of the route we took on the Queen Mary 2, and a Dogcow print, which I had wanted for a while but wasn’t prepared to pay the shipping and import fees for while I was living in Austria.

Aside from the music video, I have several other videos about moving here that I still need to edit, including:

So watch this space! (I’m adding links as I upload the videos mentioned) Or subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch that space instead.

I’ll also put more photos from the trip on Flickr, so that’s another space you can watch. For now I’ve only put up panoramas from our pre-move trip to Fügen, our view of New York from the Queen Mary 2, and our road trip from NYC to Seattle.

In other news, Joey and I once again went to the MathsJam Annual Gathering in the UK. We didn’t give any talks, participate in the bake-off, enter a competition in the competition competition, or write any new parody songs for the MathsJam Jam this time. I won one of the competition competition competitions by writing the joke ‘What do you get if a Platonic solid loses a duel with its dual’ for the pre-determined punchline ‘the phantom of the solid’, but even that was just based on a poem I wrote (and performed) previously. We did, however, participate in Taskmathster as one of the Saturday evening activities, then two days later in London, we did the Taskmaster Live Experience. Both were a lot of fun!

Also, I have just released a new Mac app! It’s the one I made to create charts of days Joey and I have spent together while living apart (as seen in my previous post about moving to the USA). I’ll post more about it later today, but I think it needs its own post.

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Dumb Parody Ideas at FuMPFest 2024

Posted by Angela Brett in News on October 9, 2024


FuMPFest is a funny music festival put on by the Funny Music Project, which I had never attended in-person because it’s not worth travelling from Austria to the USA for just a weekend. But now that I live in the USA, I finally got to go! It was put on as part of Con on the Cob, and was quite similar to the comedy music track at MarsCon (also run by people from The FuMP), which I have been to a few times when it happened to be a week out from JoCo Cruise. Both are approximately the same friendly group of comedy musicians and comedy music fans, having a small comedy music festival while surrounded by a larger convention.

One thing that happens at FuMPFest is the Dumb Parody Ideas contest, where people sing a few lines (up to 90 seconds per idea) of dubious song parodies. I had a few ideas for this years ago (I have a note with the lyrics from 2021), but never had a chance to enter… until now! The first one is a parody of Losing My Religion, by REM, inspired by the six and a half years of regular FaceTime calls with Joey while we were still living on separate continents:

Lyrics:
That’s me in the corner.
That’s me in the FaceTime, losing my connection.

The background is a screenshot I took while losing my connection in a real FaceTime call with Joey. The me in the corner was added in post, a little larger than the actual size of the inset which would have me in it. Joey’s playing ukulele offscreen.

The other parody idea I had was of Enya’s ‘Only Time’, which (like most things), Joey sings better than I could. We recorded a video of it before FuMPFest, because the only Dumb Parody Ideas panel I’d seen was at an online-only version of the con in 2020, so I wasn’t sure whether people would be doing them live for this one. The first take was pretty hilariously bad, setting us up to laugh through some of the later takes, so here’s the video with out-takes.

Lyrics:
Who can say where the road goes?
Where the day flows?
Google Maps.

In the end Joey did perform it live, followed by another dumb parody idea that Joey came up with on the day. A few hours before this panel, Devo Spice showed a short horror film which featured the song (of anonymous authorship) ‘I Sh💩t More in the Summer’. Joey parodied it with the things we do more at FuMPFest, taking inspiration from the FuMPFest bingo cards we were given.


Lyrics:
We chant COG! more at FuMPFest
than we do at any other time of year.
We yell ‘moisture!’ [more] at FuMPFest
than we do at any other time of year.
Eat from a food truck
“Corned beef and Cabbage”
Tune a guitar on stage
We all stall more at FuMPFest
than we do at any other… …stalling for time of year!

Both Losing My Connection and Google Maps were finalists in the competition, though we didn’t win the coveted golden spatula. Surprisingly, Joey’s last-minute parody was not nominated, despite the more developed lyrics and clear pandering to that specific audience.

Overall, we had a great time at FuMPFest. It was all streamed live on The FuMP’s Twitch channel, and at least for now, there are archives of the shows available there.

The next big thing on my calendar, which also includes song parodies and can be attended virtually, is the MathsJam Annual Gathering.

As promised in my last post, I put my new macOS app on TestFlight, and have already fixed some issues that were pointed out. It’s the app that made the chart of days that Joey and I have been together in person. It could be used to chart anything where you can summarise each day with a few colours or emoji — long-distance relationships, travel, moods, daily progress towards goals, the timeline of a novel you’re writing, weather, etc. If you’re interested in trying it, let me know somehow and I’ll add you to the list of testers. Otherwise, watch this space and get it when I release it some day soon.

When I’m not going to conventions, working on apps, and trying to convince various internet companies that I live here, I am still looking for a day job. Let me know if you know anyone who would like to hire me.

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Logan Awards Finalists (with links)

Posted by Angela Brett in News on May 8, 2015


Recently I had the honour of being a fan juror for the Logan Whitehurst Memorial Awards for Excellence in Comedy Music (Logan Awards for short.) It was great to finally have an important reason to listen to comedy music for several full days, and a response to the eye-rolling of my friends when I mentioned yet another funny song, although deciding which songs to vote for was pretty tough. As a juror I had to listen to or watch all the songs and music videos nominated by the general public, and choose my favourite five nominees in each category. I can’t tell you which ones I voted for, but the finalists (chosen based on the votes of all the jurors, with ties broken by Dr. Demento) have been announced. Since the page on the Logan Awards site doesn’t link to the songs in question, I thought I’d link to them here. In alphabetical order:

Outstanding Parody Song

Out­stand­ing Orig­i­nal Com­edy Song

Out­stand­ing Com­edy Music Video

Here’s a YouTube playlist of the music video finalists:

The winners will be announced at FuMPFest on 5—7 June in Wheeling, Illinois. If you like funny music and are anywhere near there, I recommend going; it sounds like great fun. Many comedy musicians will be there, including guests of honour The Arrogant Worms. I saw some of the same performers and fans at the MarsCon 2014 dementia track, and it was a blast.

I’d like to give the other nominees a bit of publicity, but it’s difficult to do that without people making inferences about my votes, so here is a YouTube playlist of all the videos nominated in open nominations for the ‘Outstanding Comedy Music Video’ category, sorted in ascending order of views because the ones with the fewest views need the publicity more.

If you’re a Paul and Storm fan, you might be wondering why no songs from their 2014 album Ball Pit are in the finals. Some of their songs were nominated in the open nominations, but they became ineligible for the award when Paul Sabourin joined the jury. In honour of Paul’s noble sacrifice, I present to you a nominated video of this song of theirs which would have made the judging harder for me, if only because of all the freeze-framing to see the details:

If you’d like to hear more comedy music, consider subscribing to The FuMP podcasts, where you can get several comedy songs a week for free. You can find even more funny music on the Mad Music Archive, the Dr. Demento Show, or Songs About Science & Math. Also, check out the Logan Whitehurst website to find out about the awards’ namesake and buy his music.

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Seven of Hearts: mp<3 (Half-Assed Rapper Version)

Posted by Angela Brett in Shakespearean Insults, Writing Cards and Letters on May 20, 2013


IFRemember that poem I wrote about heart-drive based music players, which I said I imagined as a rap? Well, here’s a recording of me ‘rapping’ it (now with new cover art.)

I wore my MC Frontalot glasses while recording it in case they would imbue me with talent. It’s probably still terrible, but I don’t care if you laugh at me or with me, as long as you laugh.

According to The Burning Hell, apart from all the rabbit, chicken, worm or artificial hearts, inside every one of us there also beats the hearts of a mother, a father, a trapper, a cult leader, a comedian, and an amateur rapper. The hearts of a mother and father in me went into cardiac arrest when they saw what parenthood was like (to quote the same song again, where would I find the time to build my compound, my comedy career, my empire of rhyme?) but maybe the hearts of a trapper, cult leader, comedian and amateur rapper still beat in me. In fact, they’re probably quite easy to beat.

It’s pretty light on instrumental stuff, because every time I tried to add something I realised that I’m not very good at making things line up with beats properly, and I was probably making things worse. This is a clear sign that I am a half-assed rapper and should stick to normal poetry, but I’m not going to cudgel my brains about it. Edit, one day later: You know what? I bet you could do better than I could. Here, have a remix kit consisting of all of the parts not already linked from this post or easy to find on the internet, plus a different version of ‘Copy Protected!’. Most of the backing tracks I did use are there more for pun value than anything else: some heart beats, the omnichord track (cheesy panning added by me) and artificial heartbeat sampler track from Jonathan Coulton’s Artificial Heart, the start of Worm Quartet’s I Want To Be Taken Seriously As An Artist (when I start talking about worms) and of course, Devo Spice’s Earworm at the end. My robot choir sang the ‘copy protected!’ part in the Trinoids voice. I would apologise to the artists whose sounds I used in this monstrosity, but when you release music under a Creative Commons license, you have to be prepared to face the consequences. This is also my second song-like-thing in a row containing a Wilhelm scream. Perhaps I should include one in every song; my terrible music screams, so you don’t have to! If Possible Oscar can include Wilhelm screams in songs, so can I.

Fill their briefcase with cut out hearts bloody 400Am I being too self-deprecating? The ad at the beginning just happened to come out at 30 seconds, which I think is a standard length for an ad, so that was nice. Also, I quite like the ending; the intro of that song happens to loop quite nicely at the right length for my words. I hope you get it stuck in your head.

I set the artist name to Angelastic, because rappers never seem to go by their real names, and the song is quite gelastic. I’ll probably submit it to The FuMP sideshow, because I’ve always wanted to submit something to that, but it was difficult because I don’t normally sing when people can hear me, and most of what my robot choir has sung so far isn’t really suitable. Edit: I submitted it.

One thing I discovered while recording this was that I have great difficulty pronouncing the word ‘earthworm’ quickly without making some kind of weird flap or trill sound between the r and the th. That’ll teach me for pitying the unpronounced r’s enough as a kid to adopt a rhotic accent.

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