Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Innes

It lands like an offhand aside, but it’s doing careful work: Neil Innes is sketching a boundary between two kinds of “funny music,” then winking as he draws it. By invoking Frank Zappa as “far more musical,” Innes isn’t just paying tribute; he’s acknowledging a pecking order in a world where comedy can be misread as lack of craft. Zappa stands as the rock era’s patron saint of virtuosity plus satire, the guy you cite when you want to remind everyone the jokes ride on serious chops. Innes, associated with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and later the Monty Python orbit, knows exactly how often novelty acts get filed under “goofy” and forgotten.

The phrasing matters. “But I mean, again” performs modesty and self-awareness, the verbal equivalent of shrugging while keeping your eyes locked on the listener: he’s anticipating pushback, or repeating a point that’s been litigated before. It suggests an interview context where comparisons were already in the air, likely the familiar British-comedy-vs-American-rock-intellectualism trope.

There’s also a sly defense embedded in the concession. By admitting the Bonzos “ever were” less musical, Innes reframes their achievement as something else: timing, absurdism, character, the surreal British tradition that treats music as a delivery system for social mischief. The compliment to Zappa doubles as an insistence that “musical” isn’t the only metric that matters - just the one people reach for when they want to sound serious.