David Bowie’s formative, pre-“Space Oddity” years on the Deram label are a catalog of puzzling creative decisions and musical influences (e.g., Anthony Newley) unfamiliar to most American rock audiences. Nowhere is that more apparent than “The Laughing Gnome,” a novelty song featuring Alvin and the Chipmunks tape effects and a bunch of horrible puns on the word “gnome” (some of which contain British references that will also be unfamiliar to Americans). And it wasn’t forced on Bowie by his record company; no, “The Laughing Gnome” was conceived and written by the future Ziggy Stardust himself. Let’s take a leisurely stroll through it, shall we?As the song begins, we hear a bassoonist enjoying a rare opportunity to earn income via employment at a recording session. In the first verse, Bowie meets the title character randomly wandering around on High Street. Apparently the sight of a gnome on the streets of London hasn’t attracted anyone else’s attention, and Bowie, smelling opportunity of some sort, invites the gnome back to his place to watch some telly. It isn’t clear whether television is an invention familiar to gnomes in Bowie’s fantastical fantasy land, but the gnome certainly does enjoy it, laughing the day away in front of it, and not helping out with the dishes.
Bowie has to cook for this thing too, and the gnome proceeds to eat his roasted toadstools and get hammered on his dandelion wine. Saddled with a drunken deadbeat roommate who does nothing but watch TV all fucking day, Bowie tries to get rid of the gnome, putting him on a train to the beach resort town of Eastbourne. Before he does so, he engages the gnome in conversation, and learns that it comes from “Gnome-man’s land, hee hee hee.” Bowie replies with a chatty “Oh really?”, but since the conversation ends right there, the wooden chumminess and pointless inclusion of the line end up recalling Tommy Wiseau’s work in The Room.
The trip to Eastbourne really just gives the gnome an opportunity to collect his brother Fred, another ne’er-do-well in need of a place to crash. When Bowie wakes up in the morning, both gnomes have snuck back into his house, and are sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at him, waiting for him to wake up so they can sing him a song. Blinded by English whimsy, Bowie doesn’t seem at all creeped out by this.
So Bowie is stuck with these freakish giggling ninnies who’ve inexplicably latched onto him and can’t be kept out of his house -- much like the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson when he befriended the Manson Family. Bowie, however, turns the situation to his advantage. What does any proper Englishman do when confronted with a new and unfamiliar race/culture/creature? Why, subjugate and exploit them economically, of course. Bowie forces the gnomes to live in his filthy, sooty chimney, call him “sahib” (NOTE: I made this part up), and support him financially by writing “comedy prose for radio shows.” One can only presume that, if said prose is as hilarious as the raft of puns in the song, the merry trio is living the high life indeed. One also wonders whether the gnomes’ comedy chops extend to material that isn’t self-referential, or whether there is simply a plethora of whimsically themed BBC radio programmes in need of industrial-size quantities of gnome puns. At any rate, there is no indication that Bowie and the gnomes plan to share their newfound largesse with the likely starving and desperate session bassoonist.
Bowie is so overcome by whimsical merriment that he is unable to contain his laughter on the closing choruses, breaking down in fits of hilarity as his slaves sing the melody from their carcinogenic miniature tenement above the fireplace. But Fred and his unnamed brother had the last laugh. In 1973, a year after Bowie’s star-making Ziggy Stardust breakthrough, “The Laughing Gnome” was re-released and rocketed to #6 on the British charts, giving Bowie the equivalent of an actress or model’s pre-fame topless photos.
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