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Let’s be honest, guys and gals: Comedy songs suck. There are a lot of reasons for the proliferation of downright awful so-called musical comedy, everything from overdone jokes to bad music or throwaway parodies.

Take “Weird Al” Yankovic, who is hugely popular one minute and playing county fairs the next. While comedy films and even musicals often inspire long-term fans, put the same thing on disc, sans the big production and slapstick, and it’s pretty forgettable.

Yankovic’s biggest hit, “Amish Paradise,” was successful thanks to the music video more than the Coolio parody itself, and even Al seems to be in on the joke. When I saw him in concert back in the day, he played in front of a massive video screen complete with a “Forrest Gump” montage. Setting the visual standards low for the audience, a magician was his opening act.

Recordings of stand-up comedy are a different animal – a funny animal. Bill Cosby earned his credibility on his early live albums and Woody Allen honed his chops on his stand-up recordings, road-testing many of the jokes that ended up in films such as “Annie Hall.”

Even David Cross is just as solid on CD as he is on “Arrested Development.” The humor springs from the words and the delivery, not a gag reel. Demonstrably, the potential exists for comedy albums to contain actual comedy.

But musical humor always seems to fall flat, and usually the fault lies with the music. Counting on jokes to carry the performance, the average musical humorist forgets to take the song seriously, leaving the listener groaning long before the songs have the chance to wear out their comedic welcome.

Parody singers like Weird Al have it easier, but why listen to “Fat” when you could be jamming to Michael Jackson? Sometimes imitation leads to something innovative, though only rarely. UCLA alumni Hard ’n Phirm’s track “Rodeohead” is probably one of the most downloaded songs in the brief history of file-sharing, but that’s in no small part thanks to the brilliance of its source material. The song draws from practically the entire Radiohead catalog, incorporating bits of 17 songs into a single, well-executed bluegrass medley.

Ultimately, though, comedy albums of any kind come down to the jokes themselves. Adam Sandler didn’t have much luck with those, although you know there’s a dearth of material when he’s releasing three versions of “The Hanukkah Song.” Now, I listened to Sandler albums at summer camp as much as the next impressionable young Jewish kid, but weirdly sexual mom jokes and ethnic accents stopped bringing the laughs after middle school.

But blatantly playing the Jew card is just as unfunny as any other gimmick. So-called musical comedy duo What I Like About Jew released “Unorthodox” this week just in time for Passover, and the 18-track album might be the most offensive attempt at combining humor and songwriting I’ve ever heard.

At least it hits all the bases: The album’s 45 minutes include laughable genre-hopping pastiches (Lounge singing? Arena rock? Eastern mysticism? ’60s mod pop? Check, check, check, check.), head-scratching punchlines (“Madonna had just become a Jew / Moses was found on the Potomac / and marched with Martin Luther King”), and enough bad jokes about stereotypes and circumcisions to make you kvetch.

There’s more to humor than just throwing out the phrase “kosher meat” with a lurid accent. If you’ve ever read “Portnoy’s Complaint” or seen a Mel Brooks film, lines about Jewish mothers and Freudian neurosis should be old news. And even if they aren’t, listening to What I Like About Jew try to be funny is almost as bad as listening to Kevin Federline try to rap.

All in all, the only truly successful musical comedy albums are by a couple of rock stars. Jack Black and his band Tenacious D never stop rocking, even when he’s cracking jokes. The guy is pure charisma and personality, and that’s not just funny – that’s rock ’n’ roll, and it never gets old.

If you’re already sick of Passover matzo, e-mail Greenwald at dgreenwald@media.ucla.edu.