I Started A Joke

This song is about someone who has done or said something horribly wrong, which resulted in alienating everyone around him. It's a great example of lyrical songwriting, and very much a love-it-or-hate-it song. With the opening line, "I started a joke, which started the whole world crying," followed with, "I started to cry, which set the whole world laughing," the song can be heard as achingly poignant or overly sentimental, depending on your mindset.

The Wallflowers covered this for the 2001 movie Zoolander. It's used in a scene where Derek Zoolander is confused about winning an award that wasn't his.

This was famously covered by Faith No More in 1995 and released as their last single after the band split up. It was issued as a bonus track on the album King For A Day Fool For A Lifetime in Argentina in 1995, and as a B-side of the UK and European Limited edition versions of the Digging The Grave CD single, which came out February 28, 1995. London Records released it as a single after Faith No More split up in 1998. The music video was made by the London Records 90 Ltd. with no creative input from the then-defunct band. As Faith No More bass player Billy Gould confirmed to Songfacts, the band decided to cover the song after hearing it at a karaoke bar in Guam, which used pornographic backdrops for the lyric screens. The band felt it was a bizarre melding and decided to record the song in Gould's basement.