Humor in punk rock

R: Did you ever read Nietzsche

L: Ha Ha Ha

R: Legs, listen to me, he said that any­thing that makes you laugh, any­thing that’s funny, indic­ates an emo­tion that’s died. Every time you laugh that’s a ser­i­ous emo­tion that does­n’t exist with you anymore…and that’s why I think you and everything else is so funny.

L: Yeah, I do too, but that’s not funny.

R: That’s ’cause you don’t have any emo­tions. (Hysterical laughter)

—Richard Hell inter­viewed by Leg McNeil, Punk, Issue #3, March 1976, reprin­ted in Punk: The Best Of Punk Magazine, !T/Harper Collins, 2012

[…] I had become a manic-depressive. I was hope­less. I could only laugh at someone else’s expense and I thrived on neg­at­iv­ity. I can see now how it was only nat­ur­al that I would grav­it­ate towards Tommy, Joey, and Johnny Ramone. They were the obvi­ous creeps of the neigh­bor­hood. All their friends had to be creeps. No one would have ever pegged any of us for any kind of suc­cess in life. But that’s how it goes. 

—Dee Dee Ramone, Lobotomy: Surviving The Ramones, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000

I always liked see­ing Dee Dee, and to my mind he was the best example of a cer­tain rock and roll essence that punk sought to embody. He was a street kid who was purely talented—he wrote most of the great Ramones songs—and who radi­ated lov­able inno­cence, even though he’d worked, for lack of a bet­ter way to earn a liv­ing, as a gay hust­ler on the street. Or maybe that’s where he’d learned the inno­cence. Like Jerry Nolan, he’d been a hairdress­er for a while, too. He had a strongly defined personality—that funny dizzy dumb style—that he had to have developed as a defense. He was like a tod­dler, stum­bling and mis­un­der­stand­ing what just happened, but who recov­ers instantly to plow ahead grin­ning proudly, endear­ingly, hil­ari­ously. With him the com­edy was delib­er­ate, if so deeply habitu­al that it became who he was. The oth­er side of his child­like goofi­ness was his tan­trums. But he was so funny, usu­ally about him­self. My favor­ite example is some­thing he said for a piece I did about the Ramones for Hit Parader in 1976. (It was the first time I’d done any journ­al­ism and the first art­icle about the Ramones in a nation­al publication.)

The band had gathered at Arturo Vega’s loft for the inter­view. Arturo was the Ramones’ art dir­ect­or and best friend and main boost­er. I turned on the tape record­er and star­ted ask­ing ques­tions. In a minute Dee Dee was explain­ing the group’s songs and he said the first one they’d writ­ten was “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” and the next one was “I Don’t Wanna Get Involved With You,” and then “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement.” I don’t wanna this and I don’t wanna that. Finally he offered, “We did­n’t write a pos­it­ive song until ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’ ” Someone who was actu­ally dumb would nev­er be able to think of that, which of course makes it even funnier.

—Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2013

I bring all this up because it’s kind of stag­ger­ing the way, to judge by the trail­er, the upcom­ing CBGB movie bol­lixes the droll anec­dote Mr. Hell relates.