The Punchliners

The Punchliners is the comedy persona on NovelGrooves - a project that writes pop songs the way The Lonely Island writes pop songs, except about whatever absurd corner of modern life happens to need a soundtrack that week.

The premise is simple: take a perfectly serviceable genre (pop, drum and bass, whatever the joke requires), write it with the sincerity of an actual single, and put a lyric over it that has no business being there. The production is never the punchline - the production is always good, because that's what makes the lyric land. The punchline is always the gap between how the song sounds and what it's actually about. A drum and bass banger about being trapped in a corporate office. A pop ballad about being a self-described genius. A new release every time the world hands the project a new target worth missing.

It's the most obviously playful corner of NovelGrooves, and the one where craft and stupidity sit closest together. The Punchliners is built on the idea that comedy songwriting only works when the music itself isn't the joke.

A The Punchliners project by Lars Curfs. For fans of The Lonely Island, Flight of the Conchords, Bo Burnham.