Aging & Wisdom Quote by Neil Innes

There is something wonderfully unserious about the image Neil Innes sketches here: grown adults combing through flea-market detritus hunting not for rare masterpieces, but for “old 78 records” with “silly song titles.” It’s a portrait of taste built out of curiosity rather than prestige, a self-education in the overlooked corners of culture. Innes isn’t describing collecting as status; he’s describing collecting as play.

The specificity matters. “Flea markets” signals the democratic archive: culture not curated by institutions, but rescued from cardboard boxes and collapsing sleeves. “Old 78s” points to pre-rock ephemera, a time when recorded music still carried the vaudeville spirit, when novelty songs and absurd titles weren’t embarrassing detours but part of the main road. That’s the subtext: comedy isn’t a lesser genre; it’s a tradition with deep roots, and if you want to understand it, you learn its grammar by digging where polite taste doesn’t.

The line also hints at a creative method. “Look for” is the operative verb: Innes frames inspiration as scavenging, a willingness to be delighted by the odd, the forgotten, the badly named. The “and things” toss-off makes the whole pursuit sound casual, even accidental, which is precisely how a certain kind of humor operates: studied craft wearing the mask of happenstance. For an artist associated with musical satire, this is the origin story of an aesthetic - reverence for the past expressed through irreverence, and a belief that the ridiculous is often where the real originality is hiding.