Why I love the Eurovision Song Contest

I am just crazy about the Eurovision Song Contest. I haven’t missed a year since 1996. There have been a couple of disappointing years, with not enough eccentricity or nonsensical song lyrics, but generally I feel it can be relied upon to provide one to three evenings of superlative entertainment come mid-May (depending on whether you watch the semi-finals as well). Why am I so enamoured of this seemingly trivial sideshow? Well, firstly, Eurovision is funny.

Humour is our most universal, pervasive coping mechanism. Most funny things relate to naivety, confusion or embarrassment, whereas jokes about deeper human suffering like bereavement or political repression are known as “dark humour” or “gallows humour”. Perhaps it’s an expression of an awareness, in the collective unconscious, of the ridiculous arbitrariness inherent in how we live. (The more you believe that human behaviour isn’t arbitrary, and actually makes perfect sense according to some belief system, the less of a sense of humour you have.)

We might say that the silliness of Eurovision reflects a buried awareness of how equally silly were previous – bloodthirsty – attempts by Europeans to compete with their neighbours. Check out this map for a summary. So many years of suffering and wasted lives, just so we could end up prancing around in feathers trilling at each other.

Pretentiousness aside, here are my top five mirth-inducing Eurovision entries (in no particular order):

1.       Ping Pong - Be Happy (Israel, 2000) Lyrics here. This band used their Eurovision appearance to promote peace between Israel and Syria – they wave both the Israeli and Syrian flags at the end of the performance. They were disendorsed by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority and had to pay to enter Eurovision themselves. The song is about a bored, miserable, apparently sexually frustrated woman who lives on a kibbutz: “Here comes the Sunday depression... I want a cucumber”. Then the woman gets a boyfriend from Damascus, who solves all her problems, and she wants to “do it with him all day long”.

2.       Eric Saade - Popular (Sweden, 2011) Lyrics here. Well, if there ever was an example of laughing at ridiculous arbitrariness, this is it. Eric likes a girl and is determined to do what it takes to impress her: “I will be popular, I will be popular... I’ll get you when I’m popular!”

3.       Guildo Horn – Guildo Hat Euch Lieb (Germany, 1998). Lyrics here. Guildo loves you - so much he’ll “come over and sing songs for you”, send you “nut cookies and raspberry ice cream” and climb all over the fixtures to prove it.

4.       Serebro – Song Number One (Russia, 2007). Lyrics here. A typical example of ESL (English as a Second Language) music, an amusing satire on the concept of the ‘femme fatale’, or both? “Oh! Don’t call me funny bunny, I’ll blow your money, yummy, I’ll get you to my bad ass spinning... I got my bitches standing up next to me”.

5.       Michalis Rakintzis – S.A.G.A.P.O. (Greece, 2002). Lyrics here. “Sagapo” means “I love you” and this could be a song about how to love one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, er, multi-faceted film characters. “If you want to get my love, if you pray for me and hope, give the password”.

Also, because I watch it every year without fail, Eurovision serves as a bittersweet life-barometer. Some years I’ve watched it in company, laughing and drinking. Other years I’ve watched it by myself, with a tightness in my chest and a thinness in my day-to-day life. May is a heady month anyway, with that psychological awakening that many feel comes along with light, warmth and the promise of summer; it is well-chosen, too, as the month to hold general elections. It’s the start of the ‘silly season’, the time for holidays and languorous drinks with friends – or, if you’re poor and/or lonely, for watching the rest of the world have fun without you.

So, if you get as much out of Eurovision as I do, I hope you get the chance to enjoy it with your chosen companions. If not, I’m sure it will happen some other year; the last time I watched it alone was 2005 (and I’ve never missed it, of course... but that’s just me!). Here’s to laughter, hope and summer dreaming.