Synopsis

Oingo Boingo's "Insanity" unfolds as a grotesque stop-motion nightmare. A small monkey moves through cramped passageways filled with scattered dolls, skeletal bodies, voodoo-like figures, and disembodied heads with their eyes removed. Three girls attack dolls with blood-stained knives, while other figures drift through the unsettling environment. The imagery grows increasingly violent and surreal as the monkey dismembers a cloth doll, removes a teddy bear from its chest, and finally crawls inside the ruined body. Danny Elfman also appears among the animated horrors.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was released in 1994 alongside the album *Boingo* and is notable for using stop-motion animation rather than a conventional band-performance format.

• The song was written during the 1992 U.S. election cycle. Danny Elfman described it as a reaction to the rhetoric surrounding Dan Quayle, "family values," and the religious right.

• Elfman based part of the track on a Bernard Herrmann cue from Alfred Hitchcock's *Vertigo* (1958), helping give the song its unusually cinematic, orchestral character.

• Elfman said the completed video was considered too wild for MTV's increasingly conservative alternative programming. Despite that concern, it later became associated with the band's *Farewell* home-video material.

• "Insanity" was issued in more than one musical version. The album recording runs close to eight minutes, while the shorter video edit presents a more compact, rock-oriented arrangement.

• The song and video arrived during Oingo Boingo's late-period transformation, when the band's music was becoming darker, heavier, and more expansive than its earlier new wave material.