My husband and I were driving to Target when “I Started a Joke” came on. It’s on my Spotify favorites playlist, so the artist and song info showed up on the car display. 1
Josh: I didn’t know this was by The Bee Gees.
Kristen: Yeah, I’m loving this lately.
Josh: Really??
Kristen: You don’t like it?
Josh: No.
Kristen: Really??
Josh went on to say that the song was sappy and sounded like something Michael Scott would sing on The Office, thinking it was profound. That’s really not a bad analogy, although I take something different from it. Michael Scott is not cool, and he’s an easy mark for ridicule. But there’s a reason the character has become a cultural touchstone, and it’s because much of his behavior reveals an awkward emotional underbelly that we can all relate to on some level. Even though he’s an idiot, he evokes pathos as much as humor. Or in other words, “I started a joke/That started the whole world crying.”
The lyrics to “I Started a Joke” really are the crux of the song. While they don’t make sense in any topical way, they’re impossible to ignore because they feel so profound. My theory is that they have a cyclical construction (joke/crying, cry/laughing, died/living) that’s almost mythological, in the Joseph Campbell sense — endless cycles of joy and pain, birth and death, the old replacing in the new. The line, “I finally died/Which started the whole world living” makes me think of Jesus every time, even though I’m not at all religious. There’s something in the nature of these lyrics that touches a purely emotional, subconscious part of me. That feeling could never could be expressed in a rational way. 2
Robin’s odd, reedy vocal is the other high point. While Barry is usually remembered as The Bee Gee’s vocalist, Robin often sang lead on the early songs, and his voice has a singularly haunting quality. On “I Started a Joke,” he comes in clear and quavering, building in power until the unsettling climax of the middle eight. The “fell out of bed” lyric suggests a nightmare, and the vocals echo a mix of despair and confusion.
Yet there’s great beauty to the song as well — the warmth of the low notes on the lead vocal, the enveloping “ahhs” of the back-up, the little string flourish at the end of the middle eight, . Getting back to the cyclical thing, this is a song of highs and lows, and musically it’s both uplifting and a little disturbing. Nowhere is that quality more apparent than on the wail that concludes the song. Does it signify despair or acceptance — or a bit of both? I think the answer is in the song, but it can’t really be spelled out here.
- “I Started a Joke was released on the Bee Gee’s 1968 album, Idea. It hit no. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, but was not released as a single in the UK.
- As an aside, this is the song that really launched my Bee Gees kick. I decided to give their greatest hits a listen, largely prompted by Noel Gallagher’s enthusiastic embrace of their early material. While you wouldn’t think of Oasis and The Bee Gees having a lot in common, read the preceding paragraph and then reflect on something like “The Masterplan” or “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Those types of unspeakably emotional ballads are Noel’s bread and butter.