You say "Funny" I Say "Beautiful"

I have found one of the best, most beautiful and moving love songs to ever grace the internet ("If I Didn't Have You" by Tim Minchin. I'm totally serious when I say that listening to it repeatedly for the transcription was hard because I kept almost tearing up.

Now, this is technically a "comedy" song. Or by "technically", I guess I mean that the singer is among other things a comedian and that the audience has reason to laugh periodically during it.

However, this is indeed an absolutely beautiful love song.

*Background vocals are in parentheses

[Spoken, low voiced and breathy]: So, uh, I'm married. And, uh, the woman I'm married to I met in High School, and this is a song I wrote for her. It's called: "If I Didn't Have You"

[Sung, Romantically, "Spanish" Guitar in Background? with R&B beats]:
Yeah, yeah,
If I didn't have you.

If I didn't have you to hold me tight,
(If I didn't have you)
If I didn't have you to lie with at night,
(When I'm feeling blue)
If I didn't have you to share my sighs,
(Share my sighs)
And to kiss me and dry my tears when I cry,
Well I, really think that I would...

Have somebody else.

[Laughter]

(If I didn't have you)
If I didn't have you, someone else would do.
Your love is one in a million,
(One in a million),
You couldnt buy it at any price,
(Can't buy love).

But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other possible loves
Statistically some of them would be equally nice
(Equally nice).
Or maybe not as nice but say:
[gester/half shrug]smarter than you,
or dumber but better at sport or...
tracing.

I'm just saying,
(I really think that I would),
Probably,
(Have somebody else).

Yeah. [Shimmies down and up]

(If I didn't have you),
If I didn't have you someone else would do, [shrugs]
(Someone else would surely do).

["Spoken Word"ish]: And look, I'm not undervaluing what we've got when I say that given the role chaos inevitably plays in the inherently flawed notion of "fate" [air quotes], it's obstruse to deduce I found my soulmate at the age of 17. It's just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth I happened to stumble on the one girl on earth specifically designed for me.

And if I may conjecture a further objection--love is nothing to do with destined "perfection" [air quotes]--the [gestering] connection is strengthened, the affection simply grows over time:
Like a flower
Or a mushroom
Or a guinea pig
Or a vine
Or a sponge
Or bigotry
[Laughter]
... or a [wide eyed] banana (banana).

And love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience and the synergy of a kind of symbiotic empathy or something.

[Sung]: So I trust it goes without saying,
That I would feel really very sad
if tomorrow you were to fall off something high [raises arms],
Or catch something bad.

But I'm just saying:
I don't think you're special.
I mean, I mean... I think your special
But you fall within a bell curve [shows a bell curve with hands].

[Laughter]

I mean, I'm just saying I
(Think that I would)
Probably
(Have somebody else).

["Spoken Word"ish]: I mean I reckon it's pretty likely that if for example my first girlfriend Jackie hadn't dumped me after I kissed Winston's ex-girlfriend Nia back at Steph's party in 1993, and our variables would probably have been altered by the absence of that event to have meant the advent of a tangential [gestering indicating other timeline] narrative in which we don't meet.

[Sung]: Which is to say there exists a theoretical hypothetical parallel life
Where what is is not as it is and I am not your husband and you are not my wife.

And I am a stuntman living in LA [arms up, as though weighing things/dancing]
Married to a small blonde portugese skier [downhill skiing motion]
Who when she's not training
Does abstract painting
Practises yoga
And brews her own beer
And really like making home movies
And suffers neck [gesters to below neck] down alopecia.

[Laughter]
[Predatory, or perhaps mischevious smile]

But with all my heart and all my mind I know one thing is true
I have just [holds right hand at waist level with index finger sticking up] one life and just [holds left hand at waist level with index finger sticking up] one love and my love [open handed toward audience/"you"] that love is you.
And if it wasn't for you
Baby
(really think that I would)
Probably
(Have somebody else).

Yeah. [Shimmies up and down]

(If I didn't have you)
If I didn't have you someone else would surely
(Someone else would surely do)
Dooooooooooooo.

[Applause]

as always, click for as complete a transcript as I can make:

Some notes:

• Tim Minchin apparently always performs barefoot, this indeed makes me happy.
• Additionally, there are lyrics online for this that seem to indicate that there is a longer version. However, I am going to say that I feel the other version is decidedly less good. In the excised portions, he goes for, shall we say, "easier" laughs. Eh.
• Greta Christina's Blog is the sole reason I saw this. Thanks Greta!

Everyone I've shown this to so far, has found this silly or funny. And I get it, I really do, the humorous aspects of it. But mostly when I watch it I think of living my life with someone I love. Knowing that the fact that we met and got together was a random chance, that any of a number of things could have gone entirely differently, and that our relationship, as all relationships, is a gamble.

My and Bluejay's getting together story isn't simple (though no one's really is): we met because his ex-girlfriend went to the same college as I did, and she in turn started dating someone who lived in my dorm, and that significant other of hers became friends with Bluejay, and she was invited to visit our college. I was in a (new) monogamous relationship with (the here-after named:) the estraNged*, and it would be a stretch to imply that I was immediately attracted to Bluejay, I was so wrapped up in being with the estraNged. Months later, after the estraNged and I decided to move to Boston (itself a haphazard choice) for the summer, ze had to just about drag me to the Dyke March here, which is where Bluejay and I re-met, and when Bluejay asked for my number, (and there were still further twists).

I tell this not just because I like to hear myself speak/see myself write (though that's true too), but also to illustrate how really truly much I appreciate the ability to find beauty in random chance love. Because I think that's honestly the case: that all love is a happy accident, making this song profoundly true, and sublimely beautiful to me for speaking that truth.


*This name was decided on jointly by us, thus making "estranged" actually, patently untrue

[Edited to fix bad coding]