“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” was originally written and recorded by the English pub-rocker Nick Lowe for his earlier, very Britishly-named band Brinsley Schwarz in 1974. It failed to chart at the time and would have passed into obscurity, save that Elvis Costello recorded a much more popular cover of the same in 1978.

Now, Costello was a big Nick Lowe fan himself; in fact Lowe was the producer turning the knobs for this very cover. They clearly got along swimmingly. Nevertheless, there is a reason why the Costello version was the one that took off, one indicated by Costello himself in his memoir: the Brinsley Schwarz version, he argued, “had originally seemed almost tongue-in-cheek, a take on that brief period after flower power when Tin Pan Alley staff songwriters seemed to say ‘Hey, let’s get in on some of this crazy ‘peace’ and ‘love’ stuff that the kids are digging today’.” There was something just a tad too winking about the original in his opinion, just a touch too jokey, leaning more into the “Funny” part of the title than the “What’s So” part. His own cover, Costello argued, was “not quite so genial”.

Costello after all, like so many New Wave singers of the era, was a Punk Rocker at heart; he it was who wrote his early hit “Radio, Radio” as a show of solidarity with the Sex Pistols amidst their ongoing BBC censorship. Costello later replaced the Pistols on Saturday Night Live in 1977 amidst their visa problems and was explicitly told by Lorne Michaels to not perform that self-same song; NBC had a major radio division at the time and would brook no such criticisms of their business model. In response, Costello pulled the most Punk Rock move possible by stopping mid-track the song he’d agreed to do instead, and loudly sang “Radio, Radio” on live TV. Purportedly, Lorne Michaels stood directly in front of Costello just off-camera and flipped him off angrily for the entire song. Got him banned from SNL for over a decade. “I want to bite the hand that feeds me/I want to bite that hand so badly,” he sings at the bridge, and the thing is, he actually did! When he finally had a chance to bite that hand, he bit it hard. It was instant legend status.

But the key difference between the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello, however, was one of motivation: as this site has discussed before, Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was motivated primarily by a desire to be a grade-A asshole before all else; any time he may have used his dickishness for good (e.g. calling out Johnny Saville as a sex pest clear back in 1978, protesting British classism, etc.) was only a happy accident. Hence, why he so seamlessly switched from being an Obama supporter advocating for universal healthcare in 2013 to being a Trump supporter advocating the exact opposite in 2018: he just wanted to provoke and offend the “squares,” no matter from which direction they came. His rebellions had no moral center. “Don’t know what I want/but I know how to get it” indeed.

But Elvis Costello really did have a moral center. He defended the Sex Pistols in 1977 not because he found their juvenile antics amusing, but because he really did despise all forms of censorship; he wrote and recorded “Radio, Radio” because he really did abhor all forms of repression and control; he knowingly jeopardized his young career on SNL because he really did believe in the dire importance of freedom of expression; and he covered Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in 1978 because he really, truly didn’t find it funny at all.

Again, Costello perhaps found Nick Lowe’s version a bit too cute, singing “what’s so funny” because at a certain level Lowe did find it funny, while Costello really didn’t. Costello already had a string of self-written hits under his belt at the time, so he certainly didn’t need to add a cover to his repertoire, but it wasn’t the hit he was chasing with this song, but the sentiment: there isn’t any thing funny at all about wanting to find peace, love, and understanding. Costello is the guy at the bar who makes some snide remark about the hippies that makes you laugh, but then looks you right in the eye and asks with a snarl, “What did I say that was funny? Why is that funny to you?” It wasn’t the naïvety of the hippies that pissed him off, but their hypocrisy, their across-the-board failure to live up to their own ideals; for that matter, that’s what pisses him off about everyone else, too.

And in this he was also, whether knowingly or unknowingly, following the example of Christ. Recall that Christ during his mortal ministry went out of his way to hang out with all the despised and trampled of society–the prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans, tax-collectors, drunkards, etc.–while the one group he absolutely could not stand in the slightest were the self-righteous religious-authorities of his day. “Oh ye Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!” he spat at them, using the absolute worst insult he could think of. For the self-confessed sinners by contrast, Christ had only love and patience and forgiveness; but the merchants in the Temple he drove out with a whip. He basically dared the religious leaders of his day to crucify him; he, too, wanted “to bite that hand so badly.”

Because Christ also wasn’t joking in the slightest when he said “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” For the Savior of the World, this commandment wasn’t some trite piece of hippie nonsense either, but literally the only way this wicked world can be saved. It takes real strength, courage, and hard work to love and understand everyone; viciousness, hatred, and cruelty are the hallmarks of the weak, the lazy, and the cowardly. It is the only true test of our mortal probation, and the one test almost all of humanity keeps persistently failing.

As Christ also taught in the Sermon on the Mount, it’s no great achievement to love your friends; everyone does that—“Do not even the publicans the same?” The real marker of discipleship is whether you can love everyone else too, even your enemies. That is far more difficult, almost impossible; but growing your love is also the only way you can grow just in general. That is, all those who refuse to take peace, love, and understanding seriously also limit their eternal progression; they really are damning their own souls to hell; and there is nothing funny about that.