It is more difficult for someone to make a career out of novelty records, but there have been a few.  Ray Stevens started with “Ahab the Arab” (it hit #5 in 1962) and had a series of other hits later in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s:  “Harry the Hairy Ape”, “Gitarzan”, “Santa Claus Is Watching You”, “The Streak”, etc.  He did some serious songs also, notably “Everything Is Beautiful”. 

(March 2013)

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One of the routines by Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters, “Three German Police Seeing-Eye Dogs and One Yellow Cat” was a Top 20 hit in 1984.  Ray Stevens supposedly adapted this monologue for his novelty song, “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival”; the lyrics mention a city just down the road from where I live:  “The day the squirrel went berserk, in the First Self-Righteous Church, in the sleepy little town of Pascagoula.  It was a fight for survival that broke out in revival.  They were jumpin’ pews and shoutin’ ‘Hallelujah!’” 

(November 2014)