I laugh at my exes because it's the most honest way I have of telling what hurts

Every time someone hears a PLANETA GAYFOLK song for the first time, I hope something very specific happens. First, that they laugh. Then, that they go a little quiet. And a while later, that the funny line has touched something they weren't expecting.

That's what I'm after. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

I write about heartbreak, ex-boyfriends and self-esteem. Romantic songs have been treating those subjects with a very straight face for centuries, with violins and tears falling in slow motion. I respect that. But when I try to write that way, it comes out false. It comes out as a man in a trench coat staring at the rain through a window, and that man isn't me.

Solemnity tells little lies

I'll put it the way I think it: when a break-up really hurts, you don't behave like someone in a bolero. You behave like an idiot. You check what time he was last online. You buy something you don't need. You tell a friend the same story four times, and by the fourth you've given it a better ending. There's a lot of the ridiculous in pain, and stripping it out so things look pretty is, to my mind, a little lie.

Humour lets me tell the part that solemnity hides. The part where you make a fool of yourself. The part where you know you shouldn't message him again and you message him anyway.

Take a title like «No quiero otro novio cojín» ("I don't want another cushion boyfriend"). Just reading it, you picture someone who's nice to hug and not much else, someone comfy who doesn't hold you up. I could have written something sad about relationships that leave you empty. I'd rather have a title that makes you smile and then, two seconds later, makes you wonder who your cushion was. Or whose cushion you were.

Laughing at something doesn't mean playing it down. Some people confuse humour with frivolity, as if by cracking a joke you were saying nothing matters. I understand the objection and I don't share it.

To make a joke about an ex, you first have to have looked him square in the face, and in considerable detail. The joke is proof that you've seen the whole of him. That's why a well-placed gag sometimes hurts more than a lament. A lament lets you cry and turn the page. A joke catches you with your guard down.

I have my doubts too. Some days I wonder whether I hide behind the wit. Whether I make people laugh so I don't have to say things straight out. Probably yes, now and then. I don't think that's always a bad thing. Plenty of people survive that way, with irony, with a quick line at dinner that cuts the tension. It's a way of looking after yourself. And of looking after others, who have no reason to shoulder your entire drama at eleven at night.

Self-esteem with a laugh

Self-esteem is the subject I find hardest. With exes it's easy to laugh, because the ex is out there and you can point at him. With self-esteem, the target is you.

A title like «La dieta del cucurucho» ("The ice-cream-cone diet") makes me laugh because it puts together two things that weigh on a lot of people: obsessing over your body and the craving you're not going to deny yourself. I won't tell you what the song says; I'd rather you listened to it. But the title already says what I think. Your relationship with your own body can be a war or it can be a comedy, and comedy works out a lot cheaper.

Among gay men there's a very particular pressure around image. Many of us know it at close quarters. Faced with that, a serious song about accepting yourself feels a bit like a leaflet from the health centre. Doing it with humour, with camp, with a touch of exaggeration, is closer to how we talk among ourselves when nobody's listening.

Because that's what camp is, in the end. Taking things seriously by taking them as a joke. Exaggerating until the truth leaps out on its own.

Lots of people found me through «Tan Cateto», on TikTok. It's a title that doesn't ask permission. I don't know what each person imagined when they saw it, but it worked as a door: you come in through the laughter and then you stay for something else.

That's what matters most to me about writing this way. That the laugh isn't the end. That it's the way in.

I write all the PLANETA GAYFOLK lyrics, and I produce the music with artificial intelligence tools that I direct. I discard a lot along the way. What I discard is nearly always whatever sounds too grave for what the lyric is saying. If the lyric winks, the music has to wink too. If it turns portentous, the joke dies, and with the joke dies the truth it was carrying.

A contradiction I'm not going to resolve

I'll confess something. Sometimes I'd like to write a completely sad song, with no wit at all, not a single wink. I've thought about it more than once. Then I sit down to write and by the third line something has already slipped out. An over-the-top adjective. A neighbour poking her nose in where it's not wanted. A boyfriend from Albacete.

I don't fight it any more. I've accepted that my way of being honest goes through humour, just as other people are honest by crying or slamming a door. I don't think one is better than another. I just know mine is this one, and that when I force it to seem deeper, it shows a mile off. The man in the trench coat turns up again.

If you've ever laughed while telling someone about the worst part of your week, you know what I mean. You weren't mocking your pain. You were putting it at a distance from which you could finally look at it without turning away.

That's what I try to do in every song. Put heartbreak at that distance, with a crooked smile, and let what was only a knot in your stomach up close become clear from there.

The songs, with their complete lyrics, are at mikesaintlouis.com.