Tom Cardy: a funny man for serious times
Human beings weren’t built to take in monumental amounts of information all the time. The reason your attention span, and mine, is shot is because we’re in constant need of novelty. We’re walking panic attacks, caught between fight and flight, desperate for the next shot of dopamine, information overload from social media platforms, or both—whatever we need to help make sense of the digital hell we’re living in or distract us from it for one blessed moment. The problem is that neither actually works for anything longer than a second, so the process begins anew. At some point, you’ve just got to make like Tom Cardy and laugh at it.
Of course, like everything else taking place in this cruel prank called human existence, it’s not that simple. Most comedy about the internet age is a bollocks casserole. You’ve got smug white men making comedy specials called ‘Trigger Warning’ on one side, then there are corporately mandated #bants being used to sell you rot on the other. In the middle is a terrifying wasteland of algorithmically generated memes pointing towards the AI apocalypse, such as ‘The Ghost of Content Future’.
While it’s vanishingly rare for comedy minds that actually understand the situation we’re living in to come forth, some have poked their heads above the parapet. Bo Burnham’s masterpiece Inside is an obvious choice. The Eric Andre Show’s genuine, uncomfortable anarchy is tailor-made to stand out amongst the internet age’s carefully curated “randomness”. Both of them are acquired tastes, though. In fact, you can even argue that Inside is barely a comedy show at all.
For me, the person who wrings the most honest-to-good yuks out of this late-capitalist nightmare is an Australian singer-songwriter called Tom Cardy. Coming out of the Sydney improv comedy scene in the mid-2010s, Cardy’s big break came when he began producing a segment for Australian radio giants Triple J called ‘Song Sequels’. These segments ran the gamut of being legitimately funny sketches and well-produced covers of popular songs, such as Tame Impala’s ‘The Less I Know The Better’ and Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’.
His mix of comedic and musical chops led to Cardy developing a cult following on YouTube and TikTok. After a year of building his reputation online, he released his first single ‘Mixed Messages’ in July 2021. In the song, Cardy started by absolutely nailing the absurdity of internet culture (in this particular case, the minefield of online dating), following it up not by saying, “Isn’t this #relatable?!” but by saying, “Isn’t this a barely understandable nightmare?” Which is, ironically enough, more genuinely relatable than most stand-up comics could ever hope to be.
‘Mixed Messages’, along with other early numbers like ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and especially, ‘Why Am I Anxious’, also had the absolute privilege in comedy music of being good songs to boot. While Cardy may have been inspired by the likes of Tenacious D and owes such a debt to Flight Of The Conchords, having covered their song ‘Carol Brown’ on his first studio album, his musical chops and knack for a slick pop hook make his songs a joyful listening experience and endlessly loop-worthy. This is just as well because the depth of his songs truly hit after a few listens.
Once you get past the surface-level joys, the vast majority of his songs are about reckoning head-on with the dreadfully difficult parts of 21st-century life. ‘Why Am I Anxious’ is about the self-destructive habits we indulge in just to get through the day, while ‘Level Clear’ is an account of existential crises told via the medium of video games. ‘HS’ is an anthem about battling self-loathing by invoking how much people love Pluto.
If I’m making all this sound a little dour, then don’t worry. He also has songs about pacifist cowboys winning duels by flipping off the opposition, and if you’re anything like me, the moment you find out what ‘HYCYBH’ stands for, it will elicit genuine tears of mirth. You’ve got to get yourself a guy who can do both in a myriad of creative ways, and Tom Cardy is that guy. He can thread the needle between knockabout larks and genuine social commentary with a surgeon’s precision because, in a strange way, what he’s peddling isn’t escapism.
How can you escape when the world’s decay isn’t just all around you, but the details of just how it’s happening are being pumped directly into your consciousness through the fountain of human knowledge dwelling in your pocket? So, if you can’t get away from it, the answer is to laugh at every aspect of it, from the surface silliness to the depths of despair. After all, the source of both is basically the same.
