Demento November - Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take The Garbage Out - Shel Silverstein

I had a lot of choices here. There are some really strong candidates on this album. There's Star Trekkin', The Time Warp, and Steve Martin's King Tut. Julie Brown's "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" was such accurate satire that it became a little too real in the late 90s. Der Fuehrer's Face and Fish Heads are both interesting choices too. However, I want to focus on a rarer track.

Shel Silverstein had an interesting drawing, writing, and songwriting career. He is most famous for "Where The Sidewalk Ends", but he also wrote "25 Minutes to Go" and "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash, and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" (and most of Dr. Hook's early songs). This song he recorded for himself. He sounds a lot like Mark Hamell forgot his cough drops before jumping into the time machine for the early 1970s. It also sounds a lot like one of his children's books being read.

Demento November -- Poisoning Pigeons In The Park - Tom Lehrer

The song is inspired by Boston's program in the 50s of poisoning pigeons to control population. Of course, Tom Lehrer had to run with it.

Tom Lehrer became famous for his satirical songs with excellent melodies (that, unlike other satirists, he usually created himself), but this is one of his early works from the fifties. The Wikipedia story goes that the pianist came to the studio not knowing the song, and his sheet music was untitled. He read the music and thought "This is a neat, simple, cute waltz." Then the engineer goes "take 1 for Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", and he fell off his stool in shock.

Demento November -- Ti Kwan Leep -- The Frantics

I absolutely adore this skit (it's attached to a song on the Dr. Demento album, but the song is actually separate on the original album). It works as an effective satire making fun of all of the martial arts movies and "wise sensai" tropes. There's not much more I can say about it other than to tell you to listen:

Demento November -- The Ballad of Irving -- Frank Gallop

With all of the seriousness in the world right now, let's listen to something a little lighter.

I refuse to start talking about Christmas songs until December, so I decided to break out an album I was introduced to in college. A friend of mine played the second CD of Dr Demento's 20th Anniversary Collection, and I thought it was hilarious. Then I mostly forgot about it until I just happened to find a copy of the album (missing CD 1, interestingly enough) at Half Price Books. We'll talk about 4 of the funny songs off this album, and then come back to songs that tend to get played in December on 11/29.

The first I'll talk about is The Ballad of Irving. This is a satire song inspired directly by Lorne Greene's song "Ringo", although it makes fun of all of the Western character ballad songs. Irving is the 142nd fastest gun in the west, and not very good at that. He doesn't even get a heroic ending....