Tamblyn, who performed for an audience of about 25 people Sunday evening at Unity of Bloomington, was on a plane once, flying from Chicago to his home in Kansas City, Missouri. It was shortly after his father died, and he found himself in an aisle seat, sharing the row with a pair of older women.
As it turned out, they were sisters, flying back from a third sister’s funeral. For 15 minutes, they told Tamblyn about memories of their sister and their present sadness. He told them he knew how they felt.
“I recently lost my dad, a couple of months ago,” he said.
“Oh, you lost your dad?” they replied. “We’re so sorry.”
“Yeah, I wrote a song about it.”
“Oh, you wrote a song? What’s it called?”
“‘Chicken Soup for the Dead.’”
They couldn’t stop laughing after that, Tamblyn said.
“It was way more than that stupid joke deserved, but all that grief came out as laughter,” he said.
Tamblyn, 63, has been combining music and comedy, to various ends, for most of his life. As a young child, he made up parodic lyrics to songs he knew, and as a kid in the 1960s, he latched on to the novelty songs that crossed over to AM radio pop stations.
In high school, he played in a rock band, but he waited until after college to start playing on his own.
“When I finally got the nerve to perform solo, I worked up some funny songs ... because I thought if I could get the audience to laugh in a bar, they’d like me better,” he said before the show.
Though Tamblyn’s songs aren’t strictly comedic, he said, many of them aim for laughs. They also tend to have a spiritual bent — hence his performance in the sanctuary of Unity of Bloomington, which bills itself as “a positive path for spiritual living.”
“You can glean a lot of messages from music,” said Danielle Bachant-Bell, a center administrator at Unity of Bloomington. “If you have a twist on it, humor is very much a healing property.”
Tamblyn said he thinks of his comedy as more intelligent than average musical humor. In one song not on Sunday’s set list, “Top Ten Whiny Victim Love Songs,” he lampoons love songs of relentless desperation.
“There’s no power in being a victim,” he said.
Tamblyn wants people to laugh, he added.
“I want them to not take themselves and life so seriously, because life is hard,” he said. “Everyone gets dumped on.”
In his set Sunday, Tamblyn followed up his “Chicken Soup for the Dead” bit with the song itself.
He said it’s actually titled “So Long, Dad (Chicken Soup for the Dead),” though no recorded version exists, at least not on the Internet.
A few seconds into the song, he stopped. He’d missed a chord or forgotten one. This happened twice more, though he was able to get through a little more of the song each time. He would come to a complete stop, then start the song over again from the beginning.
“Every time I’ve tried to record this song in 10 years, this has happened,” he said. “ ... It’s like there’s a poltergeist in my guitar.”
If this was a planned joke, intentionally inserted into the song, Tamblyn didn’t make it explicit. The crowd chuckled as he continued.
“Maybe it’s my dad yanking my chain,” he said. “I’d think he’d like it, but maybe not.”
And the sanctuary — its chairs more than half-empty, its stage bare save for the singer, his guitar and a stool with a glass of water on it — filled with laughter.
