Tim Minchin

"And fine, if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial, condescending bottled-up and labeled kind of way... then whatever, that’s okay, but! Here’s what gives me a hard-on: I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon. I have one life, and it is short, and unimportant...but thanks to recent scientific advances, I get to live twice as long as my great-great-great-great uncleses and auntses!"

—"Storm"

Tim Minchin is a flame-haired Australian pianist who once wrote an album full of silly songs to get them out of his system. When he discovered that the public loved them more than his more serious work, he became a comedian, and proceeded to become quite famous both in Australia and in the UK. He's known for his Black Humour and for his spot-on criticisms of both the religious right and the new age left.

Several of his songs have official videos, including "The Pope Song" and "Storm". The latter of which has been adapted into an animated short . He also famously serenaded Jonathan Ross' wife.

He hosted one episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Has his own YouTube channel.

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Tim Minchin provides examples of the following tropes:

• A Date with Rosie Palms: Inflatable You
• Anti-Love Song: Several.
  • You Grew On Me is a love song, despite comparing love to a malignant cancer.
  • If I Didn't Have You is "I do love you, but I'm not going to pretend you're the only person I could ever love".

If I didn't have you someone else would do.

• • • Which would make it a song in favour of realistic love...?
• Answer Song: Song For Phil Daoust, a response to a scathing newspaper review.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The Pope Song levels many accusations against pedophile priests. The very last of which, on the very last line of the song, is that they wear stupid hats.
  • In Context, Tim disccusses his hatred of, amongst other things, Africans who are racist, Japanese homophobes, the disabled rapists, and Burmese cats.
  • "5 Poofs and 2 Pianos":

And all those angry letter writers,
Like Disgusted from the Isle of Wight, and
Mad from Hull, and Outraged from Leeds,
And Slightly Annoyed from Berwick-on-Tweed...

• Association Fallacy: WoodyAllenJesus is built on this trope. Played for Laughs, naturally.
• Astronomic Zoom: Not Perfect. "This is my Earth ... This is my house ... this is my body ... this is my brain"
• Audience Participation Song: lampshaded and subverted in both Hello and I Love Jesus, played straight in Canvas Bags and Peace Anthem For Palestine.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • If I Didn't Have You says love grows "like a flower, or a mushroom, or a guinea pig, or a vine, or a sponge, or bigotry... or a banana."
  • If You Really Loved Me gets more bizarre and fetishistic as it goes along. A notable example includes Tim talking about how he could have ended up with a "small, blonde Portuguese skier" who, among several notable characteristics, suffers from "neck down alopecia".
  • Angry (Feet) gets weirder and more psychotic, until the narrator finally admits to cutting his psychotherapist's feet off and kicking him in the head with them.
  • In Cont, he expresses hatred to the rich and poor who use wealth/poverty as an excuse for bigotry, bitches who get rabies and try to bite babies and whores who don't accept Visa.
• Brick Joke: In the second verse of Rock and Roll nerd, he mentions guitar kids learning Stairway To Heaven. The outro quotes the song.
• Brown Note: "F Sharp" may very well be the real deal. Try listening to it and not cringing.
• Chewing the Scenery: Dark Side. Every Part of it. But the Reveal ( Daddy never came to my ball games...) takes the cake.
• Caustic Critic: Phil Daoust.
• Cluster F-Bomb: 86 times in The Pope Song.
• Cure Your Gays: Referenced and inverted in Five Poofs And Two Pianos
• Christmas in Australia: Basically the subject of White Wine in the Sun.
• Darker and Edgier: Parodied in Dark Side, and to a lesser extent Rock And Roll Nerd.
• Dead Baby Comedy: Lullaby which is an, uhm, lullaby about getting a baby to sleep. It starts out pretty sweetly, and ends with a line explaining that how much you love your child is directly propotionate to how dead it looks.
• Digging Yourself Deeper
• Does Not Like Shoes: Initially to stay calm on stage, Tim performs barefoot.
• Dramatic Wind: Tim even uses a fan he brings on to pull it off during "Canvas Bags".
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: The Three Minute Song. Fa-China is a Country that can bring me to my knees!
  • Two...three...fourskin...
• Granola Girl: Storm.
• Grief Song: The aptly titled The Grief Song, also known as Fuck The Poor.
• Guyliner: Because his performance doesn't allow him to gesture, he uses Guyliner to make his facial expressions easier to read from the audience.
• Hipster: Storm from, well, Storm.
• Hypocritical Humor: Referred to in YouTube Lament; the best example is probably in If You Really Loved Me:

We go together
Like a cracker and Brie
Like racism and ignorance
Like niggers and R&B

• • Interestingly, he'd later lament using the joke because, even with the obvious Hypocritical Humor strategem, the power of the slur is such that he still shouldn't have used it.
  • Invoked in Nothing ruins comedy like arenas.
• In the Style Of: "Dark Side" includes a great Pearl Jam imitation, Lampshaded by inserting a few bars of "Jeremy" into the middle of it.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: In Cheese, when Tim laments giving up cheese:

I cannot camembert it anymore!
Edam you mon amour!

• It Makes Sense in Context: Pretty much the entire point of Cont.
• List Song: The Fence, a song on how the world isn't always black and white, briefly plays this trope for one of the choruses:

We divide the world
into terrorists and heroes.
Into normal folk and weirdos.
Into good people and paedos.
Into the things that give you cancer.
And the things that cure cancer.
And the things that don't cause cancer, but there's a chance that they'll cause cancer in the future.

• Lyrical Dissonance: Quite a lot, given that he's a decent pianist with a dark sense of humour. "You Grew On Me" is something of a Double Subversion, since the gorgeous music suits the underlying sentiment perfectly well, it's just the comparison of love to terminal illnesses that breaks the spell a little.
  • Unless, of course, one is familiar with the Australian slang term moll
• Mood Whiplash: Dark Side is a blatantly lampshaded example, but there are others.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Woody Allen Jesus:

Praise be to magic Woody Allen zombie Superman komodo-dragon telepathic vampire quantum hovercraft - me - Jesus!

• N-Word Privileges: In Prejudice he mentions a word that contains a couple of Gs, an R and an E, an I and an N, which is only acceptable to be used by those it applies to.^[1]
• Radio Friendliness: TV-frienliness, at least, is discussed in The Three Minute Song
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Song For Phil Daoust and to an extent Ten-Foot Cock (And A Few Hundred Virgins). Especially, however, the Pope Song, which beats out The ICP's "Fuck The World" in F-Bomb density while ranting about the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandals.
  • How about singing a song about having sex with Jonathan Ross' wife... while on Ross' show!
• Self-Deprecation: Rock And Roll Nerd.
• Shaped Like Itself: In The Good Book, he describes the The Bible thus:

If I wanna know how to be good
it's to the good book that I go.
'Cause the good book is a book
and it is good and it's a book.

• Silly Love Songs
• Sincerity Mode: White Wine In The Sun.
• Spoof Aesop: "Confessions": We shouldn't objectify women, but fuck he loves boobs.
• Stylistic Suck: Fairly often, whether in terms of lyrics, singing, or piano.
• Take That: Mostly against religion or superstition, but without much in the way of political prejudice — he goes against the New Agey left as hard in Storm as he goes against the traditionally theistic right in The Good Book.
  • Wossy Can I Bang Your Wife is a Take That to the complainants who got Jonathan Ross suspended by the BBC, or specifically those who insisted that Ross would be traumatised if anyone dared to target him with the kind of joke that he was suspended over. Watched from this perspective, you can see that point that Wossy works it out.
• Third Person Person: Rock And Roll Nerd - "But he doesn't want to seem self-obsessed, so he writes in third-person."
• Tourette's Shitcock Syndrome: Angry (Feet), the funniest being the involuntary quacks whenever he mentions his doctor.
• Uncanny Valley Makeup: Granted, only because the bar for men is set very low, but still, it's strange to see a man, much less a straight one, wearing non-black eyeliner - especially without obvious foundation.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: Done deliberately in Canvas Bags.

1. ↑ Turns out it's "ginger".