Situation Comedy Blues - Momus

What’s a laugh?

The sound of common-sense falling apart

What’s common-sense?

A million unthinking hearts

At the end of the working day

And who am I?

Call me the barman standing waiting for the workers

To drink their work away

I’m the man who serves the laughter

To the drunkards of disaster

After they’ve got plastered on the news

And I’ve got the situation comedy blues

What’s the situation?

This man has been abandoned by his woman

What’s the reason?

He’s lost his sense of humour

This man is sober

And so he s gone to bed with another writer’s scripts

And his wife has had to move in with her mother

And the man who serves the laughter

To the drunkards of disaster

After they’ve got plastered on the news

Has got the situation comedy blues

He’s been devising a new series

Where the first man to appear is

Pakistani and the second is a queer

Who rings the bell in tights and biker’s gear

And he tells them that he’s sorry to disturb them

But the sari that the wife had on today was out of sight

And could he maybe borrow it tonight?

And the man who serves the laughter

To the workaholics after

They’ve got drunk on the disasters of the news

Has got the situation comedy blues

So the Paki asks the queen in to his brilliantly-lit kitchen

Where he demonstrates his do-it-yourself tools

He’s the type who doesn’t gladly suffer fools

But he electrocutes his finger in his biggest Black and Decker

When his wife appears in towel and rubber hat

And the bath she s running floods the neighbours' flat

I’ve been sitting here unhappily

Trying to write this comedy

When I hear a sudden laugh in the next room

And thinking it’s my woman who’s come home

I call her name expectantly and, glad that she’s come back to me

I throw away my trivialising pen.

And then the television laughs again

Marie come back to me