Late comedian Gallagher had a good reason for destroying those watermelons onstage. He’d written “No Fun” about how people have sex and get married and get divorced and get married again and get divorced again and so on. It’s not a pretty song. And this year, on the eve of the first anniversary of the election of Donald Trump, Gallagher thought he had a good idea for a song that might help get people to laugh at the absurdity of that mess. The song was “I Ain’t Even” [sic].
Gallagher told Rolling Stone last month, “I’m not a guy who’s an anti-Trump guy. It’s just that I feel like, in a weird way, this kind of thing is what people need—a little bit of a joke. I don’t think we’re that out of it and all of a sudden everything’s that serious, I mean, how did that happen?”
“I Ain’t Even” contains multiple lyrics—Gallagher actually sang only three (four, if you count the chorus)—that would be very, very funny if interpreted literally. But because Gallagher is a comedian, he took it literally. As he explained to the Washington Post:
I’ve been saying I ain’t even for a decade. I was just doing a joke and I thought, oh, fuck, I sound like Tom Lehrer singing “I’m a Legless Womp.” So I went back and rewrote it. I used about three other words and put them in there somewhere. I used all these songs in the studio. I used a lyric that I knew everybody would recognize from “Jingle All the Way” and the chorus of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” So I took that and I just put it in there.
The song’s title is an anagram of Trump’s name, and the song is set to the music of “Dancing in the Harvest Moon.” (We’ll explain this later.) But the song’s humor is not so much an indictment of the presidency as it