Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor

Image from 1919 of three men in hospital beds, two with a head bandages

Music is a multi-purpose tool, and I appreciate its role in public health as a vehicle for advocacy and education. But it also has a sharp edge, one that mocks, satirizes, and even ridicules. Today, I want to explore this opposite side, in which music pokes fun – at public health efforts, at public concern, even at the sufferers of the illness themselves – as a potent human response to pandemics. And the flu in particular has drawn the attention of some deeply creative individuals as a topic for mockery. (So did COVID, but that’s a different discussion).

Why? In part, I think that this kind of “humorous take” is a form of catharsis. People process fear and loss in different ways, and graveyard humor is a useful presence in our lives. Musical humor is also, trenchantly, a tool for criticism, including political and social criticism. Through laughter (or at least inner grins), it gives us a space to contemplate the otherwise unthinkable. That people or policies were in fact horrid. That wisdom is not always the guiding hand on the decision tiller. That casual cruelty is sanctioned, and even rewarded. That suffering has been ignored – or even dismissed. “We sing about what we cannot talk about,” say the AIDS educators (McNeil). The same seems to be true in the context of other major medical disasters as well. We sing when we cannot agree. We also sing when we wish to revisit that which we wish to forget.

These humorous takes can have a strong downside, of course. They can reinforce stigma or ridicule those suffering, trivializing real harm. That they do so with a wink and a nod makes us complicit; as viewers, we give mental real-estate to the position that these songs take. And thus, we join the jeering crowds. Miguel Mera argues that “For an audience to find something funny, they must be complicit in this anticipation; they must expect what you predict them to expect.” As we take pleasure in the subversion – anticipation followed by the twist, the dislocation, the joy of the unexpected – we move beyond our own moral narratives to join in the fun. Until we don’t, or at least, until we wish we hadn’t. The line between satire and insensitivity is always thin, especially when illness is involved. Yet clearly “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they said that” can go hand in hand with our urge to share. (Waves hand broadly at the internet.)

I offer these observations with direct knowledge aforethought that I am about to partake consciously and deliberately in that ambiguous space of sharing the uncomfortable. I disapprove of the happy message, for instance, of “The Flu Pandemic Song,” a song written and performed by The Flying Fish Sailors from Houston, TX. The repeated cheery refrain, “And they died, died, died” should be nothing to smile at. Yet die they did, those victims of the 1918-19 flu in its various waves. (Old estimates of 20 million dead have been updated since the time that Greg Henkel wrote the song to reflect more geographically diverse parameters; current consensus suggests that the death count was closer to 50 Million dead.)

This song partakes fully in the Flying Fish Sailors’ motto "Happy Music For Happy People," unless, of course, one actually attends to the lyrics. Why am I smiling about millions of deaths? Ugh, but ugh with a guilty sense of pleasure. Warning: it’s an earworm... 

That jaunty chorus may well haunt me forever. The major key and simple harmonic structures, the plain and singable melody with its high sense of motivic unity, all combine to make for a kiddy-song feel far removed from the actual meaning of the chorus:

It was the flu pandemic
And it swept the whole world wide
It caught soldiers and civilians
And they died, died, died!
Whether they’re lying in the trenches
Or lying in their beds
Twenty million of them got it
And they’re dead, dead, dead!

Once you’ve heard it, you’re stuck with it, complicit in its knowledge, and complicit in enjoying the receipt of this knowledge. (“The Flu Pandemic Song” is “Infuriatingly catchy,” as Mera once said of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers). Here we are together, grinning about the horrors of the past. And here I am, laughing along. Why?

I think that the very moment of discomfort that we experience in such songs is asking us to ask an important question. Why is it that we haven’t thought so much about the nature of this historical crisis? I mean, whether it was 20 million or 50 million dead, it isn’t the sort of thing we should go around forgetting, right? So the song serves yet another function beyond critique or catharsis: it reminds us that we need to be witness to the full scope of human experience, including the deaths – in the hospitals, the trenches, and the far reaches of the globe.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate function of songs like this: not just critique, not just catharsis, but confrontation with the past. These songs refuse to let us look away. To me, the persistence of musical mockery in times of sickness suggests that humor, even in its most irreverent forms, is a deeply human response to the chaos of disease. Whether it’s a medieval plague song, a 20th-century blues lament, or a 21st-century viral TikTok, music helps us laugh—even when (especially when?) we probably shouldn’t. 

WORKS CITED: 

• Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York : Viking, 2004. 
• Marrin, Albert. Very, very, very dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
• McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 
• Mera, Miguel. “Is Funny Music Funny? Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113. 
• The Flying Fish Sailors [Website.] https://www.flyingfishsailors.com/, consulted 2/26/25.