Novelty song

A novelty song is built around a fresh concept—a gimmick, a joke, or a sample from pop culture. It overlaps with comedy songs and musical parody, especially when the gimmick involves another popular tune. These songs were especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and saw a comeback in the 1950s and 1960s. The term first appeared in Tin Pan Alley, where it described one of the three main categories of popular music, alongside ballads and dance music. Just because a song is humorous doesn’t automatically make it a novelty song.

Novelty songs often parody or humorously comment on current events, holidays, fads, dances, or TV shows. They frequently feature unusual lyrics, subjects, sounds, or instruments, and sometimes barely qualify as music. For instance, Napoleon XIV’s 1966 “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” has little melody, relying instead on a rhythm tapped on a snare drum, a tambourine, and the musicians’ bare legs.

A guide to crafting a hit novelty single is *The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)*, written by The KLF. It drew on their own UK number-one, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” (1988), a dance remix mashup of the *Doctor Who* theme released under the name The Timelords. The book argued that, at the time, reaching number one depended less on musical talent than on market research, sampling, and gimmicks paired with a danceable groove.

By nature, novelty songs are among the most fleeting in popular music, rarely achieving lasting fame. In 2025, they were described as “popular culture’s most disposable art form.”

**History**

**Late 19th century – 1960s** Novelty songs were a staple of Tin Pan Alley from its late-19th-century beginnings and continued to thrive into the early 1900s, with some becoming the era’s biggest hits. Varieties included songs with odd gimmicks—like the stutter in “K-K-K-Katy” or the playful “boop-boop-a-doop” of “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” which made Helen Kane a star and inspired Betty Boop—silly lyrics such as “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” double-entendre numbers like “Don’t Put a Tax on All the Beautiful Girls,” and exotic-sounding tunes that emphasized atmosphere over accuracy, such as “Oh By Jingo!,” “The Sheik of Araby,” and “The Yodeling Chinaman.” Vaudeville was a perfect home for these songs, and performers like Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker became famous for them.

Zez Confrey’s 1920s instrumental pieces—gimmicky works like “Kitten on the Keys” or frenetically fast numbers like “Dizzy Fingers”—sparked a fad for novelty piano that lasted the decade. This trend was fueled by the growing availability of player pianos and phonographs; while most Tin Pan Alley music was sold as sheet music simple enough for amateurs, novelty piano brought virtuoso performances into homes for listeners who wouldn’t normally attend classical concerts.

At the start of World War II in 1939, British troops sang “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball,” set to the tune of the World War I–era “Colonel Bogey March.” Spike Jones’s 1942 “Der Fuehrer’s Face” featured raspberries in its chorus. Tex Williams’s “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” topped Billboard’s best-seller chart for six weeks and the country chart for 16 weeks in 1947–48. Hank Williams Sr.’s first hit, “Move It On Over,” had humorous and novel elements about a man sharing the doghouse, but contemporaries like Jerry Rivers argued it wasn’t a novelty song, noting many men faced similar evictions. The 1953 number-one “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” was notable for heavy airplay and a backlash from annoyed listeners. Satirists Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman, and Tom Lehrer used novelty songs to mock pop culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1951, Frank Sinatra appeared on a CBS special with TV personality Dagmar. Columbia’s Mitch Miller, intrigued by the pairing, had songwriter Dick Manning create “Mama Will Bark” for them. The novelty song featured Sinatra singing with Dagmar’s spoken interjections like “mama will bark,” “mama will spank,” and “papa will spank,” plus a dog’s yowl. Music scholars and Sinatra fans consider it perhaps his worst recording. Sinatra recorded a few more novelties before leaving Columbia for Capitol in 1952.

Dickie Goodman faced a lawsuit over his 1956 novelty “The Flying Saucer,” which sampled snippets of contemporary hits without permission to create an interview with an alien landing on Earth. He continued releasing similar hits for two decades, including the gold-record “Mr. Jaws” (1975), a number-one on Cash Box and Record World based on the movie *Jaws*. Among the genre’s more bizarre entries were Nervous Norvus’s 1956 songs “Transfusion” and “Ape Call.” The Coasters had novelty hits like “Charlie Brown” and “Yakety Yak,” the latter reaching number one on July 21, 1958, and remaining the only novelty song included at number 346 on a notable list.