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

• The Boobles — Have Nat­ural Es (a parody of The Beatles’ ‘Act Naturally‘)
• Car­rie Dahlby feat. Wyn­garde — Almost Par­ent Time (a parody of Mike Reno and Ann Wilson’s ‘Almost Paradise‘)
• Devo Spice (feat. Power Salad) — Snack Bar (a parody of Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop‘)
• Kyle Kall­gren & Tony Gold­mark — Kill the Mouse (a parody of ‘The Mob Song‘ from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. You might also like to see the video in which it appeared, though that was irrelevant to the judging in this category)
• ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Word Crimes (a parody of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines‘)

Out­stand­ing Orig­i­nal Com­edy Song

• the great Luke Ski — Fake Adult
• Mikey Mason — Last Day at Work
• Mikey Mason — Settle
• Power Salad — Ama­zon Drone
• Worm Quar­tet — Fueled by Angst

Out­stand­ing Com­edy Music Video

• CBS Fol­lies — Bitch in Business
• Epic Rap Bat­tles of His­tory — Sir Isaac New­ton vs. Bill Nye
• Rhett and Link — I’m on Vacation
• ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Tacky
• ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic — Word Crimes

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.