As an aspiring comedy songwriter, I have to reply!
I was going to post something about this some time ago....maybe I even did. One gets so forgetful these days.
Anyway...I have an instinctive 'oh no' reaction to comedy songs which is probably unfair
Not necessarily. It really depends on what you find funny. A sense of humour is a very personal thing.
But what qualifies as a novelty/comedy song? 'The Streak' must be one. 'Lily The Pink'. What about 'Yakkaty Yak'? Or 'Jilted John'? Or Billericay Dickie'?
If those are the best examples of comedy songs you can come up with, no wonder you don't like them! I've never heard of "The Streak", but the rest of them are pretty atrocious in my view - "Billericay Dickie" is probably the best of a bad bunch.
But you're really talking about "novelty" songs, which are the ones that you occasionally get in the charts. Most of the best comedy songs have never been in the charts. I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm a great admirer of the work of people like Flanders and Swann, Tom Lehrer and Noel Coward - I don't think any of them ever had a chart hit. The recent death of Victoria Wood showed that there was a lot of affection for her songs, but did people go out and buy them? No, they listened to her performing them on TV or on stage. A lot of comedy works best in live performance.
Maybe part of the (my) problem is that, like a joke, they don't stand being repeated too often so, if the music isn't great (subjective!) - and this is music, right? - it wears a bit thin with time.
That's true to an extent - if you've heard a joke once, it's less funny the second time because you know what's coming. But that doesn't mean that good comedy songs don't bear repetition. I can listen to Flanders and Swann over and over again and they still make me laugh, because a lot of the comedy is in the delivery rather than the actual song.
I don't ever need to hear D-I-V-O-R-C-E by Billy Connolly again.
I'm right with you there! How that ever got to number one I shall never know. The original deserved to be parodied but not in that awful fashion.
A rare example of a genuinely funny song that did well in the charts is "Bang Bang" by B.A. Robertson, from 1979. He seems to be forgotten now but it got to number two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pco3GJK22FII'll think of others maybe...