Is there something inherently funny about rhyming?
At this point Don Black had his please/chimpanzees rhyme quoted at him from his title song from Tell Me on a Sunday which was a little unfair, being the only really cringe-making rhyme in that whole show.
But the proper answer to the question is, I think, not quite. Rhymes aren’t inherently funny. Rhymes make us smile but the funniness of a lyric usually comes from the idea. This, for example, from A Little Night Music's "You Must Meet My Wife" by Big Steve:
FREDRIK:
She loves my voice, my walk, my moustache,
The cigar, in fact, that I'm smoking.
She'll watch me puff until it's just ash,
Then she'll save the cigar butt.
DESIREE
Bizarre, but you're joking.
"Moustache/Just ash" is about as fun a rhyme as you can think of. But it's not funny. The funniness is from the idea of Fredrik extolling the virtues of his wife to old flame, Desiree, who's simultaneously trying to seduce him. Rhymes can be elegant and witty and an aural delight. But I don't think they're inherently funny.
“Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.”. Is this cheating?
Certainly not. The lyric is, of course, by Sheldon Harnick and comes from Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man” and far from cheating is, in fact, quite brilliant. Why? Well, it's such a natural characterisation. Tevye is daydreaming about being a rich:
If I were a rich man
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum
He even loses the lyrical train of thought mid-sentence the way people singing to themselves do:
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man.
In this case the nonsense of the lyric tells us something essential about Tevye. One, that he is poor. Two, that he will never be rich. This is not an ambitious ten-point plan of how to succeed in Anatevka without really trying. All that dibby dum-ing is telling us that this is an unfocussed flight of fancy, a plea to God that will forever remain unanswered. We know it and Tevye knows it. The song (and the show) is not about Tevye getting what he wants but whether he can keep his faith (and "Tradition") when he mostly gets what he doesn't want.
Is lyrics grammatical?
Hey, that was my question. Don Black pointed to his own example in a line from "Take That Look Off Your Face":
"I bet you didn't sleep good last night"
Now this may not pass grammatical muster but "sleep well" wouldn't sing half as good due to the adjacent "L" syllables - "well last" is not easy to get your singing tongue around. And in using "good" the meaning is still plain so nothing is really lost.
Lyrics are not prose or poetry. You don't need a literary degree or a Shakespearean-sized vocabulary to be a successful lyricist or even English as your first language (the lyrics of ABBA were discussed). It always stuns me to think how such well-known phrases such as "I'm dreaming of a White Christmas" could have been put into the American culture by an immigrant of limited education like Irving Berlin. Successful lyric writing is, to an exceptional degree, open to all-comers.
Is Dolly Parton the greatest lyricist in the world?
OK, they didn’t ask this question exactly. But they did end by quoting one of her lyrics which demonstrates all the strengths of the form. The song is about a simple poor girl who falls pregnant by a man who then leaves her. As time passes and against all the evidence, she clings to the naive belief that the child’s father will return “Down from Dover”. The last lines are heart-breaking ("it's too still") in a way that only a lyric can be:
"My body aches the time is here it's lonely in this place where I'm lying
Our baby has been born, but something's wrong, it's too still, I hear no crying
I guess in some strange way she knew she'd never have a father's arms to hold her
So dying was her way of tellin' me he wasn't coming down from Dover"
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