Key & Peele, "The Power of Wings"

With all respect to Barnes & Barnes, no musical groups do comedy better than the metalheads. An entire Dr. Demento anthology couldn't stack up to the laughs provided (intentionally or not) by Spinal Tap, Steel Panther, Dethklok, GWAR, Tenacious D, "Earache My Eye" or "I'm the Man." Hell, even some of metal's biggest "serious" bands are funnier than anything on Funny or Die. Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized?" Cannibal Corpse's "Hammer Smashed Face?" Give these men the Mark Twain Prize.

Key & Peele, currently mugging on the cover of this week's Time, are the latest to join the illustrious Metal Comedy world. The video for their song "The Power of Wings," which premiered on the team's uproarious Comedy Central show, is a deadpanned tribute to metal bombast that has me laughing even harder on the third viewing. Eat your heart out, Dragonforce.

Foo Fighters: Back and Forth

Call it Even Dave Grohl Gets Band Drama. One thing that anyone who sees Foo Fighters: Back and Forth will take away from it is that you can be the coolest, funniest, most easygoing rock star in the world, and keeping a band together is still tough work.

Grohl's reputation as The Nicest Guy in Rock won't be tattered by Back and Forth, where you see him struggle to keep Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel and Pat Smear in a band together. There's a reason why it's not called Dave Grohl: Back and Forth. But this is not a side of Grohl that we're used to seeing, when he goofs around with Jack Black or Josh Homme in public. Here he turns down a cushy gig with Tom Petty (on the Wildflowers tour, no less) because it's more important to him to try out his own untested songs. He overdubs his own drums on The Colour and the Shape at the risk of hurting his original drummer's feelings, which it does. Grohl may be an uncharacteristically sweet rock star, but he's still a rock star, and he demonstrates the kind of focus and professionalism that one would expect from a guy who's led one of the biggest rock bands in the world for almost 20 years now. He's been many things to many different people, but he's still nobody's monkey wrench.

Yet Back and Forth has one thing that's even more fascinating than watching Grohl be a boss, and you know exactly what that is. "It's all about the music" is a cliché in any rockumentary, but Grohl says it here without ever uttering the words. Watching him explain how he wrote the bass line to "Enough Space" while jumping up and down to get the rhythm of a crowd of people jumping at a rock show just right is even more spellbinding than the song itself. Maybe you think that's faint praise, but even if you're not a Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Probot, Queens of the Stone Age, Tenacious D, Them Crooked Vultures or Scream fan, there's no denying that Dave Grohl was born to make music.

Song of the Day: Cheech and Chong, "Earache My Eye"

Nobody should buy comedy records. Yes, support your stand-ups, catch their tours and watch their specials. But how many times have you actually listened to Steve Martin's "King Tut" or Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room?" Recreationally? The next time you put either of those on a mix CD, count how many times you laugh and how many times you skip forward to the next track.

That stated, for however thousands of Adam Sandlers, there area few Lonely Islands or Flight of the Conchords who can make a laughs record with staying power. Metal is a prime contributor to this exclusive club, most famously with Spinal Tap and more recently with Dethklok and Steel Panther. Scott Ian has at least five songs that are as funny as anything by Tenacious D. But the heaviest, catchiest comedy metal song of all time is claimed by Richard Marin and Thomas Chong.



I love "Earache My Eye." That stupidly infectious, three-chord progression is weirdly heavy, especially for 1974, when it debuted. The lyrics, credited to "Alice Bowie," detail a a cross-dressing delinquent and don't have anything to do with earaches, eyes, missing prepositions or the "plot" to Up in Smoke, where it makes its most famous appearance.



Supposedly the boys were stone cold sober while filming this, making it all the funnier that they don't even pretend to play their instruments.

Being uproarious, left-field and easy to play, "Earache My Eye" is ripe for live covers, as the Rollins Band, Rush, Soundgarden (in a medley with "Big Bottom") and Korn have testified. Against all logic and sanity, two things that this song is not known for, the best cover version is Korn's. Mainly because it features Cheech on vocals.



As comedians, Cheech and Chong proved that a good-natured, mishap-prone duo with a low budget could invent, popularize and influence a new film genre for decades. And as Alice Bowie, they rocked as hard as David and Cooper.