Or the Goodies.As a form, pop music is simultaneously juvenile and pompous, a perfectly laudable contradiction but not one that lends itself to real humour. It's often funny ­ Puff Daddy choosing an even dafter pseudonym (P Diddy) is funny; what's left of the deranged aerobics instructor Geri Halliwell is funny; Robbie Williams thinking he's funny is funny ­ but none of those people has planned it thus. As wise old Terry Wogan once told David Icke, "They're not laughing with you; they're laughing at you."More relevant, no one ever got wealthy in the music business through overestimating the sophistication of the audience. Broad, dumb strokes sell, such as "Star Trekking", "Snooker Loopy" or KLF's shameless "Doctoring the Tardis". Novelty records, rather than outright jokes, prove more palatable. Spitting Image's "Chicken Song", a deliberate attempt to achieve such one-off status by announcing its intention, was more honest but equally awful.Even such great comic institutions as The Simpsons rarely sustain their sharpness during musical numbers.

Oddly, South Park has consistently integrated music brilliantly, largely by bowing to older forms. The full-length movie version was the best attempt at an old-style musical in years, even winning an Oscar. Anyone who has seen Trey Parker's astonishing Cannibal ­ the Musical (it does what it says) will recognise the movies he was brought up on.This Is Spinal Tap, written by a supremely talented cast with experience of the business and treated with a certain amount of subtlety, was another rare success. Heavy metal acts may appear a soft target, but Britain's Comic Strip team were miles off with their Bad News parody.

Similarly, 1978's The Rutles ­ largely based on the collaboration between Neil Innes, a musician who understood comedy, and his opposite number Eric Idle ­ retold the Beatles story superbly, the songs often more perfect than their inspirations.Today's equivalents are sometimes beyond parody. On Channel 4's fake docusoap Boyz Unlimited, a tongue-in-cheek cover of Dr Hook's, er, steamy "A Little Bit More" was pre-empted when a "real" boy band put out their own version.There is a handful of genuinely recommendable "humour" records, though. 1985's Texas Funeral by Jon Wayne (a band rather than a person, apparently consisting of veteran C&W musicians playing very badly) is undoubtedly the funniest record ever made. You can find the title track on the soundtrack of From Dawn Till Dusk, but it's just a taster. For a start, seven of the 13 tracks feature the word "Texas" in the title.