Duff

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a bar crowd, a tap pulling, a gavel — wrong room entirely)
It's a cartoon beer. It's a beer in a cartoon.

[Verse 1]
It was a joke about advertising, that's the whole entire point,
a beer so aggressively generic it's a comment on the genre,
in a cartoon that spent thirty years making fun of the exact
kind of company that would eventually go and brew it.
And then people brewed it. Of course they did. Of course.
In Australia first, without asking. And then the lawyers came.

[Chorus]
DUFF! You can't brew that! DUFF! Somebody did!
DUFF! It doesn't exist! DUFF! It's in the fridge!
A cartoon beer, a real injunction, an actual court,
arguing about the ownership of something that's not there!
DUFF! The judge had to rule on it! An actual judge!
On a beer that a cartoon dog once drank in a cartoon bar!

[Verse 2]
And the argument was genuinely subtle, if you like that sort of thing:
does a joke about a product become a product when you make it?
Can you own a thing you only ever drew as satire?
If you never meant to sell it, do you still get to say no?
The courts said yes. The courts have generally said yes.
And now there's licensed Duff, sold properly, with permission.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
So the parody became the thing that it was parodying,
completely, without irony, in a can, for actual money.
The joke about commercial beer is now commercial beer.
And it sells. And people like it. And the loop is closed.
You cannot satirise a market. The market simply eats it
and puts it on the shelf beside the thing you were mocking.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the crowd noise cuts out mid-cheer)
It doesn't exist.
It's four ninety-nine.