In a 1999 episode of the American animated sitcom Family Guy, Randy Newman was portrayed as a bespectacled misanthrope recounting, on the piano, the events of the Griffin family. He makes fun of how the matriarch Lois eats an apple.

Wipe it on her blouse! Saliva workin…”, he sings. When he adds “The Walking Fat Old Husband” by Peter Griffin, Lois throws the apple at him. She also knocks him out, then tells the family, “Let’s get out of here.”

In real life, Newman, one of America’s most respected yet misunderstood songwriters, usually gets the opposite reaction to his performances. His next two shows in Dublin in March, billed as “An Evening with Randy Newman”, are highly anticipated.

Those who only know Newman for movie songs like “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from toy story and the Monsters Inc. hit ‘If I Didn’t Have You’ (or even ‘I Love LA’) might be surprised that the majority of its songs have a tragicomic view of the world and the cynical eccentrics within it.

“It’s nice to be able to say you have a friend, you have a friend in me, and not sound like a used car salesman,” he once said. “But I’m generally more interested in outliers, people who are a little off. For me, there are more things to do.

Winner of two Oscars, three Emmys and seven Grammys, he is as much a satirist as a songwriter. The narrators of his songs, often acerbic and heavy with irony, uproot uncomfortable truths about the world and humanity. Critic Mike Powell wrote, “Newman’s sleight of hand is to pop a monster out and make you see the human underneath.”

1972’s “Sail Away,” from the album of the same name, was a depressing masterpiece. It was delivered from the perspective of a slave trader: enticing poor souls to board slave ships off the west coast of Nigeria to come to Charleston, on the promise that they “will sing Jesus and will drink wine all day.”

“There’s nothing better than ‘Sail Away’,” commented longtime fan Bob Dylan.

Two years later, “Rednecks,” his upbeat jeremiad against racism in America, pointed out that the north, with its urban black ghettos, had no right to feel morally superior to the south when it came to the treatment of blacks. (“He’s free to be caged in Harlem New York / He’s free to be caged on the south side of Chicago.”)

The natural sense of the sardonic in his writing was matched by his dry sense of humor. In an interview with Playboy magazine, he was asked about the reaction to his album good old boys which was told from the perspective of Southern bigotry and contained the song “Rednecks”.

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“The hype around this album was ridiculous to me,” he said, recalling how one reviewer compared him to notorious Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. Later in the interview, when discussing his family life and the fact that his wife was from Germany, he joked, “I married Heydrich’s daughter.” (Newman, who is Jewish, of course did not marry Heydrich’s daughter, but married the kind Roswitha Schmale, born in Düsseldorf.)

He was born on November 28, 1943 in Los Angeles. Very early, he moved to New Orleans with his mother, while his father, a doctor had gone to war.

Even as a child, what he saw in the Deep South shaped his hatred of prejudice. His experience of being Jewish there also prompted what would become his few autobiographical songs, “Dixie Flyer”, where he writes about meeting a family “trying” to be like Gentiles/Christ, they also wanted to be. of the Gentiles. .”

At the age of five, back in Los Angeles, he underwent the first of four operations to correct his severely cross-eyed eyes.

“School was painful,” he said of that time. “It wasn’t the best time of my life.” He suffered from low self-esteem. He took piano lessons and started writing songs. His father then tied the emotional courage he found to writing songs to the piano.

“I think he would have spilled his cork if he hadn’t had his own words to sing,” his perceptive father said.

Having uncles who were Hollywood royalty helped. Alfred Newman, her father’s brother, was a film composer who won nine Academy Awards. His other uncle Lionel, also a composer, won an Oscar for Hello Dolly! He says he was aware of this family tradition from an early age.

At 16, his first song, ‘They Tell Me It’s Summer’ was recorded in 1962 by Washington vocal group The Fleetwoods. He soon began having his songs recorded by other artists, such as Lou Rawls, The O’Jays and by Eric Burdon of The Animals.

In 1967 he married Roswitha, who worked in California. Until then, he lived with his parents in Los Angeles.

In 1968 he released his self-titled debut album, featuring the remarkable track “I Think He’s Hiding”, an ironic rebuke to Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead”. It was followed by 12 songs album in 1970, with rolling stone magazine writing that “it comes to you from the corners”.

That same year, Three Dog Night had a number 1 hit in the United States with a version of Newman’s song “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)”.

Despite this success, Newman was not well placed.

“Things were falling apart around me,” he said at the time. ” I did not have money. The bank attached this and that, and it didn’t bother me at all. My wife was worried. I even started to worry a bit that it didn’t bother me. I just couldn’t bear to work.

“I don’t think I’m that neurotic usually. But I get a little neurotic when I’m writing. I can’t think of anything else then, and it’s unpleasant. I find that difficult. And mean. And I’d rather not do it. Someday I won’t. I just can’t take it anymore.

The lack of success of the 1974 album good old boys did nothing to ease the anxieties of his wife or his bank manager. Fortunately, in 1977 he had the biggest hit of his career to date, when ‘People of short stature’ petty criminals album reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Like many of Newman’s songs, it was a highly ironic attack on prejudice as he saw it.

In a 1979 interview with rolling stone, Timothy White wrote that Newman “survives an unhappy childhood and blossoms into a miserable adult”.

For a time he then concentrated on soundtracks for films: 1981 Ragtime saw him nominated for two Oscars. In 1985, he and Roswitha (with whom he had three sons, Amos, Eric and John) divorced. “I think Randy had to prove to himself that he could do it on his own,” she said.

He married Gretchen Preece in 1990. They have two children, Patrick and Alice.

In 1996 he started these fuzzy and warm songs – for toy story in 1996, The life of an insect in 1998, Monsters Inc. in 2001, and Cars in 2006. While they were hits, many fans preferred the more misanthropic songs of his career.

On his last album, 2017 Black matter (his first album of new material since harps and angels in 2008), he has a song about Vladimir Putin’s habit of taking off his shirt for pictures, although he left another song – about Donald Trump’s private parts – off the album.

The album included the sprawling eight-minute saga “The Great Debate,” a song where astrophysicists debate God versus science with religious leaders.

In the song, he jokes at his expense. One of the debaters tells the moderator that Newman “creates characters, like you, as objects of ridicule. He doesn’t believe anything he makes you say, nor does he want us to believe what you He’s a “strawman”, sings his narrator, and he’s “easy to knock over”.

It’s one of the few moments of introspection in Newman’s 60-year career.

“In my obituary, which will be soon,” he said in 2019, “it will say ‘Short People’ composer Randy Newman — it will be in the first sentence. Right after “Trump’s penis songwriter”.

The first line of his obituary could also include another song. The big California cynic mellowed enough recently to write the pandemic croon “Stay Away” in which he advises the world: “If the kids are scared, tell them not to be scared / But don’t let them touch your face…”

Randy Newman plays Vicar Street in Dublin on March 15 and 16. Tickets available on ticketmaster.ie