Robert Christgau once asked how many times can you hear the same joke before it stops being fun? The answer is over and over and over again appears to be the easy answer. When I was a teen, before video, before everybody filming everything, recordings of standup acts were all that remained of some of the greats. Without a Lenny Bruce stand-up album I owned, I'd have thought Dustin Hoffman's lousy timing was the same thing. And without the live in Vegas double, all I'd have known from Woody Allen's stand-up would have been three minutes in "Annie Hall".
It made Bob Newhart a star as well, with "The Buttoned Down Accountant" and cross the pond, comedy songs were mutating with rock and roll as Peter Sellers spoke "A Hard Day's Night" (I know, but do you want to spend the rest of the day reading about comedy albums?).
Nowadays Weird Al is the sine qua non and Jimmy Fallon is the son of rock comedy. His new album, Blow Your Pants Off, are parodies (not satires) of incongrous mash-ups, Dylan sings "Charles In Charge:, Neil Young sings everything else, and "Friday" gets a huge production number with Taylor Hicks and Stephen Colbert. Amusing? Very. Seen it before? Absolutely, these are old "Late Night" sketches.
Not all of it is up to this caliber, the Cougar country didn't thrill me and if we are going to have two Neil Young parodies, why wasn't one of them with Bruce Springsteen on "Sexy And I know It". Plus, they could have easily released all three history of rap with Justin Timberlake."History Of Rap" is so great it deserves its own album! And the second (the one I went to!) is where they mixed the obscure and the seminal to best effect and it ain't hear though I love the one that is The Doors singing "Reading Rainbows" is a drag, Weird Al's "Craig's List" with Ray Manzarek on keyboards fries it to a crisp.
There is as much edge to cheerleader Fallon here as there is on his nightly TV talkfest. Jimmy is well beyond not rocking the boat, the man gives the term innocouous whole new vistas of meaning. So nothing here hurts at all. Yankovic rewrites the lyric to hits and sings them in the style of famous artists, Jimmy chooses funny covers like Neil Young singing "Whip My Hair".
I really like this but I don't think I'll able to listen to the same joke over and over again unless Woody Allen is telling it… so I guess Christgau was right.
Grade: B+