There are songs and performers who are just funny. On purpose or not, they’re just funny.
I’m not talking here about funny songs with funny lyrics, like Tom Lehrer’s, but music that is funny or musical performers who make you laug
Florence Foster Jennings is the Gold Standard here. As is her male analogue, Thomas Burns.
Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, “Cocktails for Two”
For deliberately mangling a song, though, no one has matched Jonathan and Darlene Edwards (Paul Weston on piano, Jo Stafford singing). On piano, “Jonathan” (Weston) plays every cliche on the book. He speeds up on all the easy parts and slows down dramatically when the going gets hard. Throughput, he mangles, mangles, mangles. As to “Darlene” )Stafford), she was the master of off-key, off-tempo and misinterpretation. There’s one song, I can’t remember which, where the two of them add an extra beat to the melody line. It’s repeated over and over and every time it throws the whole melody line out of whack. I used Darlene singing “Cocktails for Two” (see above) for the parlor scene in Mary Chase’s Harvey, when Ellwood Dowd comes home and finds his sister is hosting a musical soiree in the parlor.
Guckenheimer Sauerkraut Band, “Stars and Stripes Forever”
When I was single, I shared an apartment with Frank P. He was a teacher like me but he worked a second job at his parents’ diner in downtown Berea. Occasionally after work, he would bring a music student from Baldwin-Wallace, our local college, back to our apartment to talk about music. The students tended to have strong opinions on all things musical. If the guest was pontificating too much, he’d pull his leg by asking him about particular pieces of music we owned. I would play this recording of “Stars and Stripes Forever” by the Guckenheimer Sauerkraut Band and tell him that it was our high school marching band and I wanted this judgment on it. Of course it’s not a professional group but don’t you think it has something? The poor soul would sit there as the band butchered the tune, but he couldn’t be absolutely sure they were playing badly on purpose. Then the vocal would kick in, delivered in a fake German accent, and everything changed.
Hoffnung Music Festival: Chopin’s Mazurka #47, scored for four tubas
Gerard Hoffnung was a cartoonist known for his caricatures of musicians and musical groups. He founded a gag music festival in London called the Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival. One time, they played a Mozart concerto with the strings loosened on all the violins, violas, cellos and basses. Here, he has rescored a Chopin mazurka for four tubas.
Spike Jones, “Flight of the Bumblebee”
Spike Jones’s music was endemic in the ’40s and early ’50s. He even had a (short-lived) television variety show in the very seal]rly ’50s. His music was never subtle, just crude and effective. His best takedown of the classics was this rendition of “The Flight of the Bumble Bee,” played here on trombone and accompanied by piano and sneezes. He did a killer version of the William Tell overture too.
Anthony Braxton, “M-22,” Creative Orchestra Music 1976
Here’s Anthony Braxton’s deconstruction of American marching band music on “M-22”, from Creative Orchestra Music 1976. It’s meant to be, and is, both funny and serious at the same time.
Ray Draper, “Angel Eyes,” Tuba Jazz
Ray Draper, on tuba, proves that tubaists should avoid playing slow ballads. It sounds basically like farts as melody. This was another piece I would play when we had a visitor who was too certain about his musical judgments.
,
Han Bennink, one of avant garde jazz’s most noted drummers is known as a trickster, who will play anything percussive on any surface anywhere and at anytime.
When I bought a copy of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, it came with either a second record or an extra track on which conductor Leonard Bernstein explained why it was funny.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING:
Mrs. Miller, “The Girl from Ipanema” (1966)
MUSIC & ME 