Corpsing / Music

• When Bruce Springsteen recorded a live performance of "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," he was so flustered by the onstage Santa's antics that he was clearly struggling to get the last lines out.
• Elvis Presley had an epic one during one performance of "Are You Lonesome Tonight", following a deliberate Lyric Swap which he would often do during live performances of the song. It allegedly happened because a man in the audience responded to the line by getting up and removing his toupee. Elvis saw this and cracked completely.
  Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
  Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?
  Is your—(chuckles on the word "heart") Filled with pain? Shall I come back...? (loses it)
• Kid Cudi has one at the end of the Piss-Take Rap "Maui Wowie" after someone puts a fart noise effect to cap off the song.
• Garth Brooks did this several times during the taping of his Double Live album. One turned "Unanswered Prayers" into an Audience Participation Song. Another was on "It's Your Song", a track whose studio version is very hard to find.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • His song "Albuquerque" contains some strange lyrics, so strange that if you listen carefully at the end of the song's recording, you can hear the guitarist laugh.
  • In the music video of "You Don't Love Me Anymore", a close-up of Al at one point shows he is holding back a laugh.
• The Beach Boys break into (arguably drug-induced) fits of giggles at the beginning of "Little Pad".
• Michael Stipe:
  • Stipe can clearly be heard cracking up on "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" after the line about Dr. Seuss, reportedly due to his repeated mispronunciation of the name as "Dr. Zeus."
  • On "Voice of Harold", Stipe stifles a laugh when he sings the line "J. Elmo Fagg, founder and leader of the Blue Ridge Quartet".
• Kurt Cobain unsuccessfully suppresses a chuckle during the second full chorus of Nirvana's "Milk It".
• Paul McCartney stifles laughter while singing the second verse of The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" because John Lennon mooned Paul in the recording studio as he sang the line "so he waits behind". (The other Beatles hated "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" because of all the time they spent working on it, and Lennon had called it "Paul's granny shit" at one point.)
• Bob Dylan:
  • He cracks up at the start of "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" because the rest of the band misses the cue and had to start again, and this was kept in the final recording.
  • In "Please, Mrs. Henry" by Bob Dylan and The Band, Dylan cracks up for unknown reasons at the start of the last repetition of the chorus, then quickly recovers in time for the song's ending.
  • In "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", Dylan breaks out into fits of giggling several times, possibly due to shouting in the background from the band.
  • Yet another example appears in "All I Really Want to Do", after Dylan says "I ain't looking for you to feel like me, see like me, or be like me."
• King Crimson's "Indoor Games" ends with vocalist Gordon Haskell breaking into laughter, his explanation is that he thought the lyrics to the song were ridiculous.
• Joe Strummer cracks up in the middle of "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" as he starts to sing "They got Burton suits, Ha! You think it's funny?"
• David Bowie at the end of "The Laughing Gnome".
• Barenaked Ladies:
  • Mentioned in character in the song "One Week".
    "How can I help it if I think you're funny when you're mad, tryin' hard not to smile though I feel bad. I'm the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral, can't understand what I mean, you soon will."
  • Literally happens in "If I Had $1,000,000" by the same band during the line about fancy ketchups.
    "And we could buy these really expensive ketchups... / (cue giggling on this line) Dijon ketchup! Mmm!"
  • And again in their deliciously over-the-top cover of "Jingle Bells."
• New Order sometimes wrote their lyrics collaboratively, with a Round Robin approach where each member would contribute a line. The presence of "I think you're a pig/You should be in a zoo" in "Every Little Counts" caused Bernard Sumner to crack up, and he struggles for the rest of the verse to regain his composure.
• The Revolting Cocks did a cover of Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" with some altered lyrics - vocalist Chris Connelly was unable to stifle a chuckle at the addition of the line "He says 'I'm sorry but I'm out of KY jelly'".
• Johnny Cash corpses several times during the course of the At Folsom Prison album, most notably during "Dark as a Dungeon" in response to audience laughter.
• Prince inexplicably laughs while delivering a particularly dark lyric on the title track of "Sign "O" the Times", a Distinct Double Album not short on bleakness and disturbing imagery.
• Geto Boys, at the very end of "Trophy".
• De La Soul, "Potholes In My Lawn": Not in the song, actually, but in the music video... Plug 2 (Dave aka Trugoy) cracks up in the middle of lip-synching his first verse.
• Nelly Furtado bursts out laughing a few times on her song "Saturdays", due to the enthusiastic and campy backup singing Jarvis Church provides... in a goofy falsetto.
• P!nk causes this on the title track of M!ssundaztood, constantly grunting and groaning at the end, prompting one of the producers to ask her if she's filming an Ex-Laxx commercial.
• Beck's "Corvette Bummer" ends with a seemingly improvised list of Noodle Implements, which goes unfinished when he's unable to control his laughter.
• Mike Majewski missed close to half of an entire song while trying to hold back laughter when Chris "Captain Piss" Andrews first wore the infamous horse mask onstage.
• Bunny Bennett pulled a spectacular bout of corpsing when doing the intro sequence for Captain Albert Alexander, accidentally switched the lines with the intro to another song and ended up with this beauty:
  Bunny: Show of hands! It's pretty wet huh? Oh, that's not the right song! Boy, I'm just turning Steam Powered Giraffe into an R-rated show! I'm sorry! Gotta keep it PG, family friendly! Alright? Alright...Oh... *doubles over laughing*
• In The Lonely Island's "The Old Saloon", Akiva laughs during his first line, "Cheat at cards and get thrown out! Right out the saloon door and on your butt!"
• In the song "Rockit" by Gorillaz you can hear Damon Albarn stifling a laugh on the line I pulled myself together.... Probably kept in because it's a song about how the music industry is all about looks now and lyrics don't matter anymore, so it could be seen as a sarcastic chuckle at the line.
• This is the conceit in Spike Jones' spoof of "I Went To Your Wedding." The original is a sentimental song about going to the wedding of an ex-lover, but in Jones' version, the singer keeps cracking up into increasingly hysterical laughter at how stupid the ex looked and how glad everyone was to get rid of them.
• The end of “Faith” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra consists of a brief, extremely fast-tempo bit, followed by laughter from keyboardist Gayle Moran.
• On Miriam Makeba's self-titled album, Charles Colman can't keep it together at all on "One More Dance". Every single one of his lines tends to have him laughing hysterically.
• Siw Malmkvist famously could not stop laughing during her performance of the song “April, April” at the 1961 Melodifestivalen. She was replaced by Lill-Babs at Eurovision.
• The 1975's band member Matty does this (silently) at the end of their "Girls" video.
• In Bastille's cover of" We Can't Stop", during the randomly-inserted chorus of "Achy Breaky Heart", Dan Smith chuckles slightly and has to stop himself from laughing.
• In Ella Fitzgerald's live recording of "Mack The Knife", Ella begins to get the giggles when she forgets the lyrics to the song midway through. She quickly recovers and nails the performance by making up her own words and scatting. The result won a Grammy Award.
• Kesha cracks up at the line "Loosey as a goosey" in her song "Woman".
• The Monkees had a purposely bad song called "I'm Gonna Buy Me a Dog" on their first album, which they proceeded to ad-lib asides all through the performance and cracked each other up several times in the process.
• "What Comes Around" by Beastie Boys ends with the trio making up lines, ending with Ad-Rock saying "Doris the Finkosaurus!" and laughing.
• At the beginning of "Roxanne" by The Police, there are some discordant piano notes followed by Sting laughing. The piano wasn't on the music track; it wound up on the vocal track when Sting inadvertently bumped into a piano, and the notes plus his reaction were left in the final recording.
• Stratovarius: Timo Kotipelto can be heard very audibly and repeatedly cracking up while singing "Vapaus" (a remake of their song "Liberty" translated into Finnish), most likely because of how silly the song sounds.
  • On the demo version of the song "Fantasia", Kotipelto cracks up shortly after singing "We also make delicious lasagna!"
• Rudy Vallee recorded two takes of "The Drunkard Song" (a.k.a. "There's a Tavern in the Town") in 1934. In the first take, the one originally released, he managed to make it through with only a short giggle halfway through. In the second take, however, at about the same point he broke into uncontrollable laughter and didn't recover for the rest of the song. That version was eventually released on its own, with a special label with a note from E. Wallerstein (executive at RCA Victor, Vallee's then-label) asking for Vallee's OK to release it as "the slip-up makes the record much funnier" and Vallee giving his approval.
• Brazilian band Mamonas Assassinas was a comedy rock group, but during their only album there's a moment where singer Dinho makes himself laugh: as he saw the producer starting to lower the volume for a fade-out, he coined a weird nickname for him ("Creuzebek") and subsequently cracked up during the rest of the line.
• Julius La Rosa chuckles in the final verse of "Eh, Cumpari!" during the line "U friscalett".
• About two minutes into Lush's "Ladykillers" video, you can see Emma Anderson cracking up upon belatedly realizing she wasn't supposed to be lip-syncing that particular verse.
• U2: In the "Numb" video when the two women are kissing him, The Edge is doing a terrible job of trying not to smile.
• The Joss Stone version of "I Got the..." has her giggling during the keyboard breakdown - because it's the part Sampled Up by Eminem in "My Name Is" (live performances usually have her saying "This part really makes me want to rap").
• Insane Clown Posse: During the song "What is a Juggalo?", Violent J, in the midst of a freestyle, raps about how a Juggalo "eat[s] Monopoly and shit[s] out Connect Four". Before ICP can get to the next line, Shaggy 2 Dope breaks down:
  Shaggy: What is a Jugg- (suddenly realizes what Violent J just said and breaks into laughter) What the fuck?
  Violent J: Never mind my shit, just rap, motherfucker.
• Nanowar of Steel: Special Guest Joakim Brodén appears as a newscaster in the video of "Pasadena 1994" and is visibly struggling to keep a straight face during the first verse.
• Wheb Melinda Kathleen Reese and Caleb Hyles teamed up for Google Translate Sings I Just Can't Wait to be King, Caleb audibly laughs when trying to sing some of the wacky lines he was given.
  "In on African clothing service *giggles*, well I refuse to be!"

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