SPIN

The missing link between "music" and "comedy," novelty songs have been around longer than rock'n’roll itself — the term dates back 100 years to Tin Pan Alley. To be "novel," Webster's says, is to be "new, unusual, or different." So the songs can also be a sand-box where innovation happens, seemingly by accident.

Various Artists
Goofy Greats
K-Tel, 1978
A definitive document of lost hysterical hits, compiled by the ultimate "as advertised on TV and radio" '70s record label. Royal Guardsmen chronicle Snoopy's dogfights, Hollywood Argyles exhume a cartoon caveman, Trashmen pick "bird" as their word (then vomit all over it), Piero Umiliani's "Mah-Na-Mah-Na" sparks a nonsense phenomenon later bequeathed to The Muppet Show and Benny Hill via an Italian soft-porn flick. Lots of teenybop trifles and yokel jokes. Plus, "Ahab the Arab" and "Gitarzan" pics on the cover, without the songs to match!

Various Artists
The Very Best of Dr. Demento
Rhino, 2001
Though unshaven novelty-song king Barret "Dr. Demento" Hansen repeatedly substitutes "shaving cream" for a less hygienic "sh" word in one track (courtesy of vaudevillian Benny Bell), it was his syndicated Sunday-night radio show that made him a nerd role model. Here, he curates classics from all-time goof geniuses Tom Lehrer, Shel Silverstein, Frank Zappa, and Allan Sherman. Other standbys spit out fish heads and put pencil-neck geeks in headlocks. And proto-rapping recording engineer Napoleon XIV departs for the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time.

The Coasters
Young Blood
Atlantic, 1982
Turn-of-the-'60s Los Angeles post-doo-wop class clowns chuckle subversive mini-sitcoms penned by two bohemian Brill Building Jews. Subjects include TV private eyes, poker-playing primates with guns, Peanuts characters, prison riots, striptease performers, venereal disease, and the beleaguered plight of the American teenager. The music sometimes harks back to jug bands and frequently includes yakety sax. This two-disc vinyl collection is irresistible.

"Weird Al" Yankovic
Permanent Record: Al in the Box
Scotti Bros., 1994
Piles of parodies and polkas about food and reruns, from the most inescapable novelty artist of modern times. Steeped in Mad magazine and accordion lessons, Al broke through slicing "Sharona" into "bologna" and gave Nirvana the most honest criticism of their career: "What is this song all about? / Can't figure any lyrics out." For fifth-grade smart alecks, no rock star is greater. (Sadly, "Amish Paradise" didn't yet exist in 1994.)

Dickie Goodman
All Time Novelty Hits
Estate of Richard Dorian Goodman, 2006
With his 1956 TV commentator "break-in" 45 "The Flying Saucer," this Brooklynite figured out how to make a pop hit from snippets of other people's pop hits, paving the way for wheels-of-steel sampling and Lil Wayne Martian voices. He kept doing it, too, hitting Billboard's Hot 100 17 times, most notably with mid-'70s collages inspired by Watergate, the energy crisis, and Jaws. In 1989, he shot himself.

Cheech & Chong
Where There's Smoke There's Cheech & Chong
Rhino, 2002
These archetypal stoners got huge partly because they used the studio like a rock band. Buried among the purple haze of skits are indelible songs: falsetto-soul satire ("Basketball Jones," featuring Tyrone Shoelaces); glitter-metal pisstake predating Spinal Tap ("Earache My Eye," featuring Alice Bowie); history's only "Shaft"/Johnny Cash hybrid ("Black Lassie"); and a Springsteen spoof that ranks with the canniest records about Mexican immigration ever ("Born in East L.A.").

Blowfly
The Worst of Blowfly
Hot Production, 1996
Bridging the butt crack between Rudy Ray Moore's sold-behind-the-counter "party records" and 2 Live Crew's poon-rap, soul songster Clarence Reid celebrates holidays in ways illegal in several states while turning oldies from Bill Haley and Brook Benton ("Spermy Night in Georgia") into wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap material. "Blowfly's Rapp" (1980) is his signature moment — and one of hip-hop's first hits, indebted to Charlie Daniels, C.W. McCall, and the dozens.

The Tubes
T.R.A.S.H. (Tubes Rarities and Smash Hits)
A&M, 1981
Two years before the Sex Pistols, these Bay Area glam-prog weirdos debuted with "White Punks on Dope," a presciently trashy lampoon of privileged '70s brats — singer Fee Waybill called his mega-platform-shoed alter ego Quay Lewd. It's appropriate that their best album is this cynical contract-fulfiller from their first label, before they skillfully sold out to '80s radio, leaving titles like "Don't Touch Me There" and "Mondo Bondage" behind.