The five best-selling novelty songs of all time
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(Credits: Far Out / Press / YouTube Still / Record Sleeve)
When you think of the biggest-selling artists of all time, your mind probably doesn’t go straight to artists like Village People or Los del Río. You probably don’t think of people like ‘Weird Al’ Jankovic, but with 12 million albums sold, it’s clear that there is a big market out there for him.
In fact, there has always been a big market out there for novelty songs. Just ask Bob Merrill and Patti Page how much money they made from ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window?’ to find out.
When it comes to other art forms, there are huge markets and high demand for comedy movies and television series, humorous books and stand-up comic acts, so why not laugh a little when it comes to music as well? Even serious artists like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan like to slip a joke or two into their lyrics from time to time. And who can forget Johnny Cash singing about ‘The Chicken in Black?’ in 1984? Well, Johnny Cash would have liked to, for one, despite the fact that the song was far better than it had any right to be.
You can trace a lineage of humorous songs and poems of parody with laugh-filled lyrics all the way back through time, when court jesters and roving troubadours would sing silly versions of real-world events to keep a crowd in stitches through song, so it’s no wonder that the tradition continued into the modern day in the form of the Novelty number.
The writers of Tin Pan Alley often displayed their wit with their words, and were happy to add a helping of humour to serious subjects as well as writing some straight-up silly songs like ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’ and ‘Yakety Yak’, or injecting jokes into otherwise straight-pan songs like ‘Love Is Just Around the Corner’ (“Venus de Milo was noted for her charms, but strictly between us, you’re cuter than Venus and what’s more, you’ve got arms!”). Though some have made an art form out of the comedic format, others have taken the whole enterprise a lot less seriously and were just out to have as much fun as possible.
Often, that sense of fun is infectious. Though we all know that songs like ‘The Monster Mash’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘Witch Doctor’ or something like ‘Werewolves of London’ are less serious or ambitious attempts at art than say, Beethoven’s Fifth, ‘Blackbird’ or ‘Murder Most Foul’, they’re no less likely to stick with you. Sometimes, they even stick with an audience so much that they’re catapulted up the charts and into the unlikely upper echelons of commercial success and cement their place in music history. Just ask Bobby “Boris” Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers, CW McCall, The Chipmunks or Crazy Frog.
