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Music and humor have proven to be difficult bedfellows. It’s very easy to slip slide away into the realm of the “novelty” record – you know, the kinds of things that Doctor Demento based his radio show on for years. Setting witty verse to music risks obscuring the words, or else making them painfully obvious; and the repetition that we enjoy when listening to a favorite song often wears away the charm of a funny turn of phrase.

Having said that, people have found ways to insert humor into music – composer Peter Schickele’s madcap alter ego, PDQ Bach, is a great example, not only because he’s hilarious but also because he illustrates the problem with musical humor: the more you know about classical music and its many conventions, the funnier his works get. Mozart engaged in musical jokes from time to time, most notably in the piece called, in English, A Musical Joke. Problem here is, a lot of the “wrong” techniques that Mozart used in the 1780s became standard practice by the 20th century, killing the joke for listeners not already “in” on it.

I think that’s why the best examples of humor in the rock world are not the ones that go for belly laughs; it’s way more effective to slip in something subversive, something where you really have to be paying attention to figure out what’s going on. In his book Rebels Wit Attitude, Iain Ellis notes how David Byrne often weaves a thread of surreptitious, and often very dark, humor into his lyrics. I would say that David Bowie does much the same thing. Though not known as a musical clown, at least not until his hilarious turn in the Ricky Gervais Britcom “Extras,” Bowie has often seeded little bits of wry wit in his songs. But you have to be listening to get them. In an early song called “Eight Line Poem,” he sings the line “Clara puts her head / between her paws.” That may not make you laugh out loud, but it is a subtly witty thing to do – in the context of a song, you’d expect Clara to be the singer’s girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, or would-be girlfriend. You don’t expect her to be a dog. In “Watch That Man,” Bowie describes a party this way: “there was an old-fashioned band of married men / looking up to me for encouragement. / It was so-so.”

(Watch David Bowie serenade Ricky Gervais on HBO's "Extras")