LOS ANGELES — There’s the Weird Al way of making funny music: steal a melody, add zany high-concept lyrics and rock on.
It takes more than that, though, to craft an original song from scratch that’s not only funny and enjoyable to the ear but also fits snugly into a movie plot. And in this season of witty movie music, it takes even more to stand out.
Alvin and the Chipmunks begin their new feature with a laughably sincere rendition of Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” — better known as the 2006 “American Idol” you’re-voted- off song. In Tim Burton’s adaptation of the musical “Sweeney Todd,” which opens Friday, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter peer out from a meat-pie shop trading barbs over potential ingredients in the dark chuckler of a song “A Little Priest.” Producer and co-writer Judd Apatow’s biopic parody “Walk Hard,” also opening Friday, features the most ambitious set of big-screen comedy tunes to come along since Christopher Guest’s 2003 folk revival romp, “A Mighty Wind.”
“There was a lot of debate about how funny the songs should be,” Apatow said. “We wanted the songs to be good and to feel like he had all these hit records. But we wanted them to be also weird and wrong.”
To get there, director and co-writer Jake Kasdan recruited songwriter friends Dan Bern, Mike Viola and Charlie Wadhams to fold in double entendres, traditional melodies and a healthy dose of political incorrectness.
The first step was landing John C. Reilly to star as Dewey Cox, whose none-too-subtle character name is actually one of the most subtle phallic jokes in the film. Reilly shares Apatow and Kasdan’s bent sense of humor, and also has the authentic singing chops to pull off a cross-country concert tour promoting “Walk Hard.”
Reilly said he had always carried a guitar with him while shooting movies and was happy to bring his passion for music into his more lucrative Hollywood career.
“It was more like a hobby for a long time,” Reilly said. “Now it’s become part of my work.”
Bern wrote or co-wrote more than 100 Cox songs over the past 1 1/2 years, stopping only last week after rejiggering “Walk Hard” to “Block Hard” for a “Monday Night Football” promo.
He injected a bit of Woody Guthrie, a bit of Bob Dylan and a lot of naive condescension into Cox protest songs like “Let Me Hold You (Little Man),” honoring little people.
Humor is “just one of the colors that I play with,” said Bern, who wrote a piece called “Talkin’ Al Kida Blues” a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “It’s a really effective way of getting things across that otherwise people might be resistant to.”
Songwriter Marshall Crenshaw’s “Walk Hard” finds its humor not as much in the lyrics but in its phrasing, as Reilly repeats and stretches out the word “hard.” “It’s sort of like powerful and ridiculous at the same time,” Crenshaw said.
That’s the approach taken by innovators in modern funny songs Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer, said Harry Shearer.
“The idea is never to make the music funny,” said Shearer. who co- wrote the Guest classic “This Is Spinal Tap,” by which all musical biopic parodies must be judged. “It’s always making it musically credible and having your fun on top of that.”
