Laughing at a Funeral — Barenaked Ladies at the House of Blues

At the House of Blues in Cambridge a Barenaked Ladies number about laughing at inappropriate moments plays over the action. The jaunty, self-aware lyrics — about smiling when it’s wrong to smile — provide a conscious tonal counterpoint to the episode’s mounting tragedies and moral crises (the KSU bombing, a covert assassination, and political maneuvering). This musical beat functions as a setup and thematic motif: it normalizes nervous humor as a human defense, signals that levity and grief will coexist, and primes the audience for the staff’s efforts to manage public feeling and private guilt.