Musical Humor

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Just this afternoon my wife and I were listening to a CD devoted to musical humor, and I thought it might make a good post in this blog.  The humor in our CD was a little heavy-handed, but still funny, I thought.

There has been humor in music for hundreds of years, but I'm by no means an expert, and this isn't intended to be encyclopedic in any way, but I thought you readers might get a kick out of some of these pieces.  Humor --at the risk of going too close to being destructively analytical-- has to do with the unexpected; for this reason, I suspect that purely musical humor arrived only after the establishment of forms, that is, after the Renaissance.  Before that there was plenty of musical humor, but it has to have been driven by text, that is, the joke was in the words.  Bawdy songs probably go back as far as language, or at least alcohol.

Not exactly what we're talking about ...

To get started, I looked to see whether the subject had been covered already elsewhere on the Web, and the first link I turned up was a transcript of one of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts (which I'm told, incidentally, are a fabulous series for anyone to watch and listen to on DVD, and in which he presents an enormous array of musical information and insight) where he addresses the whole subject of humor in music.  Unfortunately, I feel, he takes a very analytic approach, and ruins the humor.  There is a sort of Heisenberg Principle there. I don't doubt for a minute that Leonard Bernstein got the humor in any music he listened to, but doing postmortems on musical humor is an exercise in futility.  Analyzing jokes is best left to comedians, and bad comedians, at that.  I'm just going to introduce you to some of the funnier pieces that I know, and maybe give you a hint as to why I find them funny.

(As an aside, some of the funniest people I know are Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent, such as Jon Stewart and Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld.  But Jewish folks also tend to be over-analytical about many things, a characteristic they seem to share with Indians (and I suppose everyone has their own favorite group of people who study humor to no avail), and manage to reduce a good joke to a pathetic piece of data.  But to get back to the music...)

Haydn (Franz Joseph, in case you were wondering exactly which Haydn it is to whom I refer, and there are at least two of them in the annals of classical music) was noted for musical jokes.  In his case, they were essentially musical practical jokes.

There is the well-known "Surprise" Symphony: by the time Haydn had got his hands on the form of the Symphony, it had settled down to a mostly standard form in which the second movement was mostly in a slow tempo (so much so that it was usually called The Slow Movement).  Some elderly musical patrons at his concerts were evidently in the habit of taking a little nap during the second movement.  So it happened that Haydn wrote in a particularly loud chord right in the middle of the slow movement of his Surprise Symphony.  I have heard this symphony only once, and wasn't particularly surprised!  Still, it is a documented musical joke, and worth looking out for.

Practical jokes, of course, are the main stock-in-trade of many jokesters, and I find them pretty funny myself!  But of course, you're laughing at the discomfiture of someone else, and there's just so much of that sort of thing that people can stand, especially the victims.  (My own students were amused at my calling them Little Bunnies, for some reason that eludes me now, and decided to play a joke on me.  One weekend they managed to break into my office, and fill it with Easter bunnies--stuffed animals of every shape and size, some holding carrots.  I found it both surprising and completely hilarious, that they would go to all that trouble!  Considering other things they could have done, I suppose I got off easy.)

Another of Haydn's practical jokes was the Farewell Symphony, in which the players were supposed to leave the stage one by one, until only one --or at any rate, only a few-- were left.  It might have had something to do with the fact that the musicians were required to leave their families behind in Vienna, and go out to the country estate of their master (Duke Esterhazy) for the summer season, which little charade had the desired effect of alleviating their plight is some way, we're told.  (I paid a little more attention to it just now than I usually have, and it's a good piece of music.  I'm giving you a link, just in case I fail to embed it successfully.)

I'm sure these escapades would be more impressive and funny when the cultural background of the incidents are taken into account.  Practical jokes are very dependent on their cultural context.

You're not going to believe this (or perhaps you are), but our dog finds some things hilarious, e.g. when somebody trips and falls.  A sure way of making her grin from ear to ear is to do a pratfall.  You haven't lived until you've seen a dog laughing.  They also think it's funny when they've defecated on somebody's favorite toy, I'm told.  Practical jokes are a low form of humor, but they have their place, obviously.

Another famous instance of musical humor is Bach's Coffee Cantata.  The humor in this little work is even more subtle, and has to do with the pleasures of drinking coffee.  For various occasions Bach wrote so-called occasional pieces, e.g. for birthdays and name-days, and sometimes the theme was a vice or hobby of the patron.  One aria in one of these secular cantatas had words amounting to: "What I like most is a jolly good hunt!", and I believe it is from this work that one of his absolutely most famous tunes is taken, called Sheep may safely graze.

In Opera, there are numerous instances of musical humor, since a major proportion of operatic themes are comedic.  The humor in comic opera only occasionally is conveyed in the music itself; the comedy is in the situations and the libretto.  For instance in The Marriage of Figaro, Figaro and the Count conspire to send the page Cherubino off to war in the army, and Figaro makes fun of him in the aria "Non Piu Andrai, Farfallone Amoroso".

Among musicians, a major cause of amusement is the ineptitude of instrumentalists.  While we listeners tend to think of bad playing as appalling and unprofessional and perhaps a waste of our money, to their fellow musicians, bad playing is, in addition, hilarious.  For reasons  unknown to me, Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus, in case you were wondering) wrote one of the funniest pieces of pure musical humor, called Ein musikalischer Spaß, or A Musical Joke.  Here's a clip of the second movement.  Listen closely at 0:40.

The French Horn is notoriously difficult to play, and here the cornists (horn players) have to actually play notes that sound wrong.

Wrong-note jokes are common in music of the late 18th century; Beethoven (Ludwig van) slid in wrong note jokes in lots of places, and I believe the most famous one is in the Eroica, or Symphony No. 3.  In one place it sounds as if the Horns made an entry too soon, but it is written that way.  There is a place in the third movement where there is not only a wrong-note joke, but a correction joke as well, where the horns rudely "correct" the right note played by one of them.  (Horn entry jokes are a sort of running gag in the Classical period.)

Various comedians have developed comedy routines around music, but the music is not intrinsically funny.  Notable among these is Victor Borge, a Danish American, who made delicious fun of well-known piano classics.  Others are Steve Allen, Tom Lehrer andHenny Youngman ("Take my wife, please!")

More recently, American Peter Schickele has been very successful at writing music that is funny.  Schickele's humor is completely over the top; subtlety is not at all what he is aiming for.  The best of Schickele humor were written under his pseudonym of P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed 20th son of Johann Sebastian Bach.  The CD The Wurst of P. D. Q. Bach contains probably the best-known of Schickele's pieces, including the Schelptet in E Flat, in which he parodies Mozart, Haydn and numerous other composers.  His Mozart parodies are amazingly clever, making it impossible to listen to Mozart without smiling to oneself.