And now, live from Elsewhere Brooklyn, performing their Greatest Only Hits, comes Thesaurus Rex. Finally, a band for people with a soft spot for word-play and horsing around. (See what I did there? Horsing around?)
Thesaurus Rex is a barbershop quartet rock band with a touch of nihilism, delivering the bad news of late-stage capitalism with the sweetest little three-part harmony and a clever turn-of-phrase.
Right off the bat, Thesaurus Rex disarms the unfamiliar audience member with a socially awkward charm. Lead guitarist Varun Jhunjhunwalla wore the cutest wire-framed glasses I’ve ever seen at a rock show. Between that and the golden-retreiver energy that frontman Calvin Rezen was putting out, I can confidently say that they were not the expected outcome from a bill featuring the smudged-eyeliner grungy Savioa and the punk Mary Shelley. Thesaurus Rex is a barbershop quartet rock band with a touch of nihilism, delivering the bad news of late-stage capitalism with the sweetest little three-part harmony and a clever turn of phrase.
Personally, I found Jhunjhunwalla to be the most alluring part of the performance, laying down sophisticated riffs and toying with time and rhythm in a way I normally don’t see from an indie rock act. But Thesaurus Rex’s broad appeal seems to come from their songwriting, crafting candid narratives about the moments someone else might try desperately to forget: the caught-with-your-fly-down, crash-your-car, oh-fuck-I’m-the-other-woman type of moments. Yet when delivered with a flippant shrug, all of the world’s most embarrassing moments are just fodder for one bit or another, one song or another.
Thesaurus Rex is just a touch too authentic to be classified as musical comedy, but it certainly blurs the lines. They’ve got long dramatic pauses, goofy faces, silly stories between songs; like when they missed a button and asked the audience “if anyone finds the chord, please return it to us at the merch table”. It keeps the audience engaged and laughing, even when they’ve never heard a song before. But Thesaurus Rex aren’t just funny, they are comical, in the truest sense of the word.
The comedy of Thesaurus Rex’s The Greatest Hits ventures one step further, more narrowly identifying the true rigid comic in characters who blindly engage in consumerism.
Philosopher Henri Bergson characterizes audience laughter as a “social gesture” offered with the utilitarian goal of correcting some rigid (non-adaptive) or antisocial behavior displayed by the comic. We laugh when a comic slips on a banana peel and falls because we all believe that they could have avoided this outcome if they had been adaptable enough to look where they were going. In this sense, songs like “The Bachelor’s Wife” and “Dumpster Fire” cue my laughter because I can identify the main character’s rigid behavior and the chaos it causes.
The comedy of Thesaurus Rex’s The Greatest Hits ventures one step further, more narrowly identifying the true rigid comic in characters who blindly engage in consumerism. Arguably their most viral song, “Ballad of a Horse Girl” is an admonitory tale wherein a horse girl turned consumerist corporate boss babe meets her untimely demise, trampled under hoof of the very creature she loved the most. “Road Rage” rages at the hulking trucks filled with empty air and male ego, and “I Won’t Hold My Breath” derides the false intellectual spending daddy’s money on drugs.
Funny, witty, clever; whatever word you choose to use to describe Thesaurus Rex, make sure you add in the magic word describing the pit in my stomach slowly dissolving with the charming delivery of each irreverent epigram.
Perhaps the greatest of all comedy is that which identifies the rigidity of our society as a whole, the antisocial nature of capitalism scam that we all engage with day in and day out. Funny, witty, clever; whatever word you choose to use to describe Thesaurus Rex, make sure you add in the magic word describing the pit in my stomach slowly dissolving with the charming delivery of each irreverent epigram.
Trust me on this, if you get to see them live, bring a blind date. I promise, Thesaurus Rex shows are ten times more entertaining if you have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about for the first five minutes.