The 18 best funny songs of all time

Admittedly, we could double the size of this list with just Lonely Island songs. But with respect to ‘Dick in a Box’ and ‘Jack Sparrow,’ if we're limiting things to just one, we're going with the Grammy-nomintated summer banger. Admit it – you sing this song every time you’re on a boat. The guys and T-Pain made this SNL Digital Short a ridiculous, infectious hit in 2009, and we’re still looking for any opportunity to get down with Auto-Tune on a watercraft.

Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement snuck a lot of sweetness into their guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk repertoire, but this is the duo at their most charmingly self-effacing. Floating on top of a cloud of pretty guitars, this Flight of the Conchords number has instrumentation worthy of a good gig rather than a good giggle and a downright brutal sense of self-depreciation as all of Clement's exes assemble to point out his shortcomings. 

We could put together a whole list of the best Weird Al songs. How can you pick just one amongst hilarious tracks like ‘Fat,’ ‘Eat It,’ ‘Amish Paradise,’ ‘Like a Surgeon,’ ‘Smells Like Nirvana’?. ‘White & Nerdy’ is one of the funniest though, as Weird Al takes on Chamillionaire, rapping about comic books, riding a Segway, wearing braces and owning a fanny pack. The song is Al’s biggest hit, and also helped ensure the world's greatest parody songwriter would survive to make a new generation chuckle. 

Bo Burnham’s hit Netflix special Inside is a deep dive into the manic, lonely and wholly universal experiences of isolation during quarantine, but the musical powerhouse's darkest and funniest moment comes with the chaotic ‘Welcome to the ‘internet.’ Racing between eerie, jaunty and breakneck, Burnham's carnival-barker delivery gives a bizarre tour of everything on the internet, from activism to Harry Potter erotica, racism, murder and everything in between. It's uncomfortable laughter, sure, but hey, that’s the horror of having ‘everything and anything all of the time’... except other people. 

London don Jimothy Lacoste has made a name for himself – literally and figuratively – with low-key musings on fashion and life in the Big Smoke. ‘Subway System’ sees him compliment the London underground for being ‘fast, like it’s just sniffed cocaine.’ Though accurate, we can’t see that line being used by TfL any time soon.

This one ain’t about scoring a really ace mark, but is about going from your 20s into (shudder) your 30s. It's a killer duet to capture this inevitable rite-of-passage: 50 percent optimism, 50 percent screaming frustration and 100 percent ukulele-flecked catchiness.

It’s not enough to credit Chuck Berry with the creation of rock and roll. For as long as there has been rock, there have been novelty songs. And as long as there have been novelty songs, there have been songs about genitalia. Berry’s song, of course, deals in innuendos – it’s supposedly about ringing a bell, not your bell – but it’s still a a legend. Chuck Berry walked so that Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake could stuff their ding-a-lings in a box. 

With the Dust Brothers on production and Dave Grohl on drums, Jack Black and Kyle Gass' debut is a bonafide stadium-leveler. All that production shimmer is best realized on ‘Wonderboy,’ a vividly stupid fantasy epic in the key of Zep, if only Robert Plant was drowning on about ‘mucky muck’ and other nonsense. The album rocks socks off from front to back, but no song captures the collision of absurdity and excess better. 

Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer were so convincing in lampooning the early days of hair rock that songs like ‘Big Bottom’ – a hackneyed, bass-laden tribute to butts in the tradition of ‘Fat Bottom Girls’ – wormed its way onto the real radio. Tap had too many ‘hits’ to count, and while we might want to retire to the ‘Sex Farm,’ ‘Big Bottom’ will always draw the biggest laughs.

Before she became an awards darling in The Farewell, the artist sometimes known as Nora Lum unleashed this viral hip-hop parody in direct response to the misogynistic ramblings of Mickey Avalon’s ‘My Dick.’ ‘Awkwafina’s a genius, and her vagina is 50 times better than a penis’ she raps in her smoky rasp. We can vouch for 50 percent of that statement on the strength of her extremely gross James Lipton name-drop alone.

This Croydon, England lad’s novelty grime tune went platinum at the start of last year, garnering a mad 325m YouTube views. The tune goes off with its Giggs’s instrumental – and, for those who know, the ting goes ‘skrrrahh, pap, pap, ka-ka-ka, Skidiki-pap-pap, and a pu-pu-pudrrrr-boom.’

No prizes for guessing this minute-long song’s narrative – it’s all about defecating on your mother (and your father, too, for good measure). Part of rubbish punk band Terminal Margaret’s repertoire in the Boosh episode "Journey to the Centre of the Punk," it ends with the head-spinningly meta line: ‘I did a shit on your shit.’ Nice.

A groundbreaking bit of cable-TV profanity when it hit MTV in '92, Leary’s swaggering parody of American dickishness could have sounded outdated. This is, after all, a song mocking America's most flippantly shitty urges: a fake celebration of pissing on toilet seats, littering and mocking the disabled. After the Trump era, it’s as biting as ever. Turns out these types of assholes aren't just around. They’re more empowered than ever.

In the grand tradition of Günther’s ‘Ding Dong Song (You Touch My Tralala),’ this pulsing club banger so convincingly sends up old-school pan-European techno that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the real thing despite the fact that it’s a song about men named Kiki and Choo Choo doing the world’s most seductive dance. It became a TikTok sensation, sure. But were you to hear it blasting at a disco somewhere in Croatia, you wouldn’t know any better but to dance. 

John C. Reilly’s transformation into Johnny Cash/Brian Wilson/Jerry Lee Lewis in the criminally underrated Walk Hard was so convincing, you could put nearly any song from the soundtrack on and dupe listeners into thinking it’s the real deal. ‘Royal Jelly’ finds Reilly channeling Dylan at his most rambling, and you’d be forgiven if you take it for the genuine article… up until you hear lines like ‘Rim job fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum’ emerging from the speaker.

On its own, this whistle-swept vaudevillian number feels like a jaunty, goofy number from the Flying Circus crew. In the context of Life of Brian – where it’s played over a mass crucifixion – lines like ‘life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it’ followed by the titular refrain are downright diabolical in their hilarity.

Doja Cat is a multi-hyphenate rapper/singer/Grammy nominee/sex symbol/influencer and one of the most popular artists in the world. She is also a cow. At least that’s what her first brush with fame would have you believe: It’s a self-released rap song featuring a video in which Doja dances in front of a green screen chanting ‘bitch I’m a cow’ in between silly-as-hell verses. It’s so dumb it’s funny, but the real joke’s on us: That signature throwback porno-funk beat is going to get stuck in your head, proving that even when she’s playing around, Doja is the real deal.

In between songs about murder, prison and murder in prison, Johnny had a funny streak, one that comes to the fore in this extended dad joke of a country song about a guy assembling a Frankenstein-car out of parts he's stolen off the assembly line over the decades. It’s worth it just to hear the Man in Black's voice break as he reveals the mutant car he’s inadvertently created at the song’s end.