(Credits: Far Out / Queen Productions)
Mon 17 November 2025 20:00, UK
There is perhaps nothing in this world quite as subjective as humour. For proof, go to any comedy show or head to the cinema to see any funny film. What you’ll witness is exactly the dilemma Queen kept running into – what’s funny to one person will go completely over the head of someone else.
Allow me to exemplify this with an anecdote. Earlier this year, I went to my local cinema to see Andrew DeYoung’s debut feature film, Friendship. Its lead star is Saturday Night Live’s Tim Robinson, so you know it’s going to be funny, but funny in a very specific way that toes the line between slapstick and painstakingly cringe.
Me? I giggled a bit. Next to me, a woman didn’t laugh once throughout the whole hour and a half. But two seats down from us, a man was absolutely cackling. His laughter was reverberating around the room. Three different reactions, all born from different backgrounds, that make for different ideas about what in this world is funny, and what isn’t.
That’s why comedy writing is known as the hardest kind, and why trying to put humour into a song is something artists are often warned off. It always hits on the same issue, where the listeners are divided, and the musicians have to accept that while some will get it, others simply will not.
Overwhelmingly, though, Brian May and his band found that people rarely seemed to get it when they put a laugh into their world, or dipped their toes into the world of irony. It’s always frustrating, making you want to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them until they realise the joke, or loosen them up until they stop taking everything so seriously. However, the death of the author denies that – once a song is out in the world, it’s out of a band’s control.
Brian May and Freddie Mercury in 1977. (Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
For Queen, that song was ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. To them, the titular statement was a joke. It was an ironic take on the idea of individual responsibility amidst an ever-maddening world, or even a sarcastic riff about how, in an unfair world, it’s easy enough for the privileged to say something as useless as “Keep yourself alive!”
Mercury is getting at that as he sings, cheering in the chorus, “Keep yourself alive / Ooh, it’ll take you all your time and money / Honey you’ll survive,” taking a shot at how you can buy your way into a good life and the rest can merely scrape through.
“Right from the beginning, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ was meant to be ironic—like, if keeping yourself alive is all there is to life, maybe there isn’t much point,” Brian May said, but it just didn’t register, “it was taken as, ‘Hey, keep yourself alive!’”
It was an issue they stumbled into a lot as the band loved adding some wit and a joking nudge into their tracks, but listeners always seemed to take everything so sincerely. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ got the same treatment as May explained, “We used the old Fritz Lang film Metropolis in the video, where they’re all being martial, all doing the same thing, and the words are about things getting too structured and people losing their individuality. But unfortunately, not everybody gets it,” feeling the meaning of his song slip away when everyone is merely clapping on beat to a song they think is about the radio playing hit tunes.
The curse never ends. Even today, irony is so often missed in music and artists are constantly misread or misunderstood simply because their jokes don’t land right. “It’s hard to be ironic in music, that’s one thing I’ve learned over the years,” May said, still desperate to get the giggle from his crowd.
Related Topics