Courtney Barnett’s five funniest lyrics to date
“I think you’re a joke, but I don’t find you very funny,” Courtney Barnett drawls on the second song of her brilliant debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. No one could accuse Barnett herself of lacking a sense of humour.
Despite the fact that her songs so frequently touch on many unfunny topics—anxiety, depression, social isolation, self-hatred and climate change, to name just a few—Barnett manages so often to capture the light amidst the dark with a wry smile, an off-hand comment or a caustic turn of phrase. She can infuse a simple idea with an ironic turn, either with a clever couplet or else thanks to her trademark Aussie slur. She doesn’t ever dismiss the severity of the issues she’s singing about, but rather, diminishes their power and makes them more manageable by reducing their impact with a nudge, a wink and a joke.
When you watch Barnett’s 2021 intimate cinéma vérité Anonymous Club, it is clear that she is in possession of quick wit, a constantly processing mind and, at the heart of it all, a warm, good-spirited nature that means she uses her humour and her wit to disarm or diffuse, rather than to destroy.
She also comes across in the film, in her more unguarded and carefree moments, as quite playful, quite mischievous and a lot of fun. That sense of playfulness comes across in some of her most inventive rhymes, too, and the audacity of the wordplay can create additional layers of humour to appreciate on top of everything else. Lines like “you love I love Christopher Walken, I guess at least we have got one thing in common”, “this, that, the other. Why even bother?” and “now we’ve got that percolator, never made a latte greater” are hysterical in their ingenuity.
Her casual, easy delivery always makes it seem that it all comes so easily to her. Hence, sifting through the genius, we’ve picked five of her funniest lyrics for your entertainment.
The five funniest Courtney Barnett lyrics:
‘Elevator Operator’
“Oliver Paul, 20 years old
Thick head of hair worries he’s going bald
Wakes up at a quarter past nine
Fair evades his way down the 96 tram line
Breakfast on the run again, he’s well aware
He’s dropping soy linseed vegemite crumbs everywhere.”
The opening song from Barnett’s full-length debut, the rhythm and lyrics waste no time getting to the point. Images flash by relentlessly from line to line and scene to scene, while Barnett’s relentless delivery is pushed by the insistent rhythm of the drums, bass, electric piano, and guitar.
The whole story is a hilarious snapshot of a day in the life of a 20-year-old office worker—the whole life of e-mails, zoom calls, meetings and the occasional slice of company-bought pizza ahead of him—who decides to skip work for the day and head to the top of one of Melbourne’s tallest buildings to take in the view. On the way up in the elevator, a woman pushing towards the other end of her life (“Her heels are high and her bag is snakeskin, hair pulled so tight you can see her skeleton / Vickers perfume on her breath, a tortoise-shell necklace between her breasts”) mistakes his disinterest for despair.
“Don’t jump, little boy, don’t jump off that roof”, she implores, because “I’d give anything to have skin like you!”, which really shows you where her priorities lie rather than her concern for the life of the “little boy”. He assures her that he’s “not suicidal, just idling insignificantly”, which would be a whole lot funnier if it weren’t so unfortunately relatable in the face of yet another day of emails.
‘Avant Gardener’
“The paramedic thinks I’m clever ’cause I play guitar
I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying”.
From the great pun in the title to all of the absurdly mundane details and imagery in the lyrics and the fantastically droll delivery, this song is hysterical from start to finish, even though it has no right to be. After all, what’s so funny about having an anxiety attack while trying to do some Monday morning, or is it afternoon, gardening?
Opening with a hazy, lazy, monosyllabic mumble, Barnett sets the scene with the sarcastic “I sleep in late, another day, oh what a wonder, what a waste. It’s a Monday, it’s so mundane. What exciting things will happen today?” and over the next couple of minutes packs in some of her most bleakly funny images (“I’d rather die than owe the hospital til I get old”), inventive and outlandish rhymes (“I’m breathing but I’m wheezing, feel like I’m emphysem-ing, my throat feels like a funnel filled with Weet-Bix and kerosene”) and a great punchline (“I take a hit from an asthma puffer / I do it wrong, I was never good at smoking bongs”).
While the first half of the track lulls you into a false sense of comfort with the regularness of the line of thought, the last line in the first verse hits quite abruptly, which is exactly what a panic attack can be like. It hits out of the blue, without context. The next verse sees her dealing with the attack but also being vehement in making sure her experience remains funny and relatable. She may not be good at breathing in, but she’s excellent at making jokes in the face of an emergency, laughing at which makes you worry about your own sanity.
‘Nameless, Faceless’
“He said ‘I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup
And spit out better words than you’.
But you didn’t.”
A funny lyric from a song about a seriously unfunny subject, this one is all in the delivery. Barnett said that she was reading some internet comments in response to her work when she came across the line “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you”.
In this song about societal misogyny caused by fragile masculinity, the casual, off-the-cuff “but you didn’t” is the perfect rejoinder to the try-hard internet comment. With lines in the opening verse like “You sit alone at home in the darkness with all the pent-up rage that you harness, I’m real sorry ’bout whatever happened to you”, Barnett gave us the ultimate anti-incel anthem long before the Tate Brothers irreversibly corrupted the mind of a generation of young men.
Quoting Margaret Atwood in the chorus, Barnett neatly sums up the root of the problem at the heart of the divide between the sexes in contemporary society, “Men are scared that women will laugh at them” / “Women are scared that men will kill them”.
‘Boxing Day Blues (Revisited)’
“I’m feeling fine,
except the times I’m not”
If you could sum up all of Courtney Barnett’s lyrics in just one line, then this is it. It’s even delivered with a crash of a cymbal and a full stop from her Fender Jaguar to emphasise the point. Immediately after the declaration that she’s feeling fine, Barnett goes back on herself, “Why are you so calm? I wanna shout. I wanna rip my goddamn throat out!”
And for the few remaining lines of the song, she is similarly changing her tune with each additional image. “Like a Christmas tree on Boxing Day, thrown away, why don’t you feel for me anymore?” she sings at one moment before switching to “Just like two icebergs in climate change, drifting away, why do you feel for me anyway?” in the next.
It perfectly encapsulates the conflicting emotions that embody December 26th, with the after-Christmas lull setting in and the end of the year ever-nearing, bringing with it the rush of making the last few days count, it’s bound to make anyone feel a little blue.
‘Pedestrian at Best’
“Give me all your money, and I’ll make some origami, honey”.
And so, back where we started, to Barnett’s masterclass in building images, internal rhymes and frenetic delivery. ‘Pedestrian at Best’ is a rapid, machine-gun spray of ideas; a song overflowing with thoughts, images, noise and doubts. “My internal monologue is saturated analogue”, she sings. “It’s scratched and drifting, I’ve become attached to the idea, it’s all a shifting dream, bittersweet philosophy. I’ve got no idea how I even got here, I’m resentful, I’m having an existential time crisis”.
And she doesn’t stop there; the words keep piling up and so do the puns in context, along with the rhymes and the funny, off-the-cuff moments. Though she advises against putting her on a pedestal, suggesting that she’s “pedestrian at best”, but, seriously, Courtney Barnett’s talent is no joke and no amount of clown makeup is going to mask that.
