Humor in Music!

There are many kinds of humor in music. For a long time I have been interested in finding representations of laughter in music. Even in Mozart, you can find laughter! It goes like this: high, short notes, descending, sometimes cascading up and down.

Then, there are the obvious ones like Victor Borge, Spike Jones, P.D.Q. Bach, and the Hoffnung Festival. Victor Borge is my particular favorite. He had many musical ways of making people laugh: first, by mocking the ways that people play their instruments -- for example, he would fall off the piano bench or he would instruct the singer as she rested her hand in the curve of the grand piano, "Don't touch the piano, please." The second way he used humor was to make new arrangements of familiar music -- changing wildly into a new key all of a sudden or starting with one piano piece and changing into a pop tune suddenly.

Here is a great rendition of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody.