This article is worth reading just for the featured clip of Dudley Moore playing "Colonel Bogey" in the style of a Beethoven piano sonata.
The lugubrious minor key phrases, the bloviating coda that takes up the last 1:30 of an already short piece ... if you know Beethoven's style the parody is really funny. :)
But I want to more or less set aside all the sight gags and word games in a lot of generally bad humor about classical music relying upon the literary approach. Having a couple in couples counseling where she has a fermata and he's spiccato relies on a raft of other cliches and tropes that are needed in order for the joke to "land". Now there's something to be said in favor of humor relying on conventions or subverting expectations but disruption is the basis of the jokes that land and the musical jokes that work best are the ones that disrupt one convention while fastidiously observation other conventions. Dudley Moore transforming "Colonel Bogey" into the basis for a Beethoven send-up is just one example.
I'm enough of an animation buff that there are a couple of musical jokes that have stuck with me for years. For instance, Chuck Mangione playing Taps on King of the Hill is one of the best musical punchlines I've ever seen and heard in my life. At a funeral Taps is not supposed to mutate into "Feels So Good" and we know it (or we don't and then the musical joke is incomprehensible).
In the Dudley Moore parody a foundation for the joke is that it has been axiomatic that Beethoven could take small, even trivial musical ideas and spin them out into giant, epic musical monuments that last for ages ... but not march tunes notoriously associated with bawdy or obscene lyrics. After the age of Romantic art-religion the disconnect is between what has been held to be axiomatic about Beethoven's method and the inescapable extra-musical/non-musical associations with "Colonel Bogey" that make any attempt to Beethovenize the song come across as ridiculous. We don't expect a Beethoven to make the Diabelli variations out of the music you hear when you hit the Demo button on a 1980s Casio keyboard because, people who knock on Diabelli as a mercenary hack (which he kind of was) tend to forget (on purpose) that he did occasionally write some fun stuff. If Diabelli's music was "that" useless Beethoven, with all his craft and inspiration and blah blah blah couldn't have made the Diabelli variations as long as he did. But Beethoven still didn't do a sonata based on a "Colonel Bogey" melody.
It's easier to pull off that sort of musical joke by playing a melody that was in a major key in a minor key. For instance, playing "Little Bunny Foo Foo" in minor will tend to be funnier than playing it straight because we expect the song to be in a major mode. Musical jokes can, of course, go in reverse, with a musician playing riffs from twenty different heavy metal songs in parallel major rather than minor modes.
This kind of musical humor depends upon subverting a musical expectation while another type of musical humor hinges upon neutralizing the extra-musical emotional potency of a musical convention by lampshading it so hard you can't hear the songs that use the convention so much as you hear the convention and nobody has run with this kind of musical joke as hard or as long as Axis of Awesome's "Four Chord Song" routine. A lot of the lesser efforts at humor in and about classical music don't actually go for the music.
The Van article highlights that many a musical joke lands because of something being sent up along the way that is not strictly musical. Take church music, for instance. I have been to enough camp meetings and altar calls in my life that I have sometimes thought about writing 24 variations on "Just As I Am" to gently spoof how once a musician gets into working the groove of an altar call song it can seem to go on ad infinitum but I haven't actually done that (yet). In fact in a lot of altar call music it could feel as though the song was on some inhumanly inexorable loop that didn't even require a human being to be playing the song (which, of course, someone was, usually).
Another element of that musical culture that can be ripe for satire is the emotional-crowbar song--and a variation on that with a more secular bent was South Park's glorious bit where the boys of South Park are dreading the "Crack Baby Commercial". The tear-jerker ballad is, after all, among the most venerable traditions in human song and the punchline is that not even Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflofski are immune to it under the right circumstances.
But in each of these cases where I think the musical joke lands we need to know a lot about the extra-musical/non-musical associations that a piece or a style or a genre of music has before the music can even land. In script-writing parlance almost any and every musical joke is likely to be a "two percenter" unless we're talking about musical tropes so famous that you can four-chord your way to explaining why four-chord strophic form power ballads keep showing up decade after decade ... . It's not that, as an author put it, music theory isn't funny so much as that what we keep doing with music that can be so easily explained by theory (such as the I-V-vi-IV loop) can be funny. Why? Because you would think that in an era with as much knowledge and educational resources as we have that we would be more jaded by laws of diminishing returns about the cliches of musical practice than we are and yet four-chord power ballads keep on coming. That means neither that such a venerable tonal convention is "used up" nor that it will always "work".
Sometimes a chord change such as i-VI-III-VII will be stately and sad like "Fall of Gandalf" but the same root movement progression can be triumphant and aggressive in a different musical context, like Boston's "Peace of Mind" Now you can't possibly get more cliche than Boston's song in rock `n roll terms and yet, obviously, the song has stuck around because there's something to be said for giving an audience exactly what they want. One person's musical sublime could be another person's tripe. Some people dig Boston and they're okay but they're not my favorite. I'm not, to be honest, a Beatles fan as such but I like Toru Takemitsu's music and I even like what Takemitsu did when he tackled arranging Beatles material for classical guitar. Takemitsu took the material seriously and didn't make it into a musical joke even if a lot of other composers working in avant garde settings in the 1960s through the 1980s could have done that.
And European composers did do send ups of American popular styles in the first part of the last century. The reason so many bids at ragtime by European composers in the first half of the 20th century failed was because they couldn't stop satirizing the musical language of ragtime that they heard as a throwback to what was, for them, a delegitimized holdover from European salon music. They heard the old they wanted to be free of not the new that African American musicians were bringing into what for many a European composer was a "used up" language--it was used up for some but not for others. But ragtime also evolved in part through a process of ragging the classics, which absolutely involved doing send up versions of works by Wagner or Mendelssohn. There's a place for musical satire and whole genres of music can emerge through subversively redefining the hoary cliches of an earlier genre but at some point sincerity of some sort comes back into the music-making and people love the music being made to a point that even if began in part as a send-up of something that came before it new ways of playing and new ways of hearing let music that may have been arch and jocular a generation or two ago become the solemnly appreciated music of the present.
I wonder lately whether classical music "can" be the grist for a Dudley Moore style send up these days and whether the probably that it "can't" tells us more about the perceived decline of the style than completely serious takes on the perceived death of classical music does. Arch musical jokes about the cliches of music seem to be easier to pull off with a shared audience if the music has enough of an audience to be in on the jokes.
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