The ligher side

On one Friday evening, I went into this free concert performed by the San Francisco chamber orchestra not knowing what to expect. When I learned that it was about music humour I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.

The concert was something to titter over. I found myself giggling at times, not purely aided by the audience laughter, and I was curious why did the music evoke such a reaction. So naturally, I did some research afterwards to figure out what exactly makes music funny.

After some research, I found this site which provides explanations to techniques used in musical humour. The following are some of the ways (copying verbatim from the site):

Device	Description
The Unexpected	music which surprises us by defying our expectations - The Surprise, A Musical Joke, The Anti-climax
Imitation	a whole spectrum of imitiation from gentle Pastiche to Parody and Satire, including Irony and Sarcasm
Humour arising from musical situations and people	e.g. the seriousness of Classical Music and its rituals
Music Recognition	using familiar themes to comment on something in a funny way, e.g. Jaws/Shark, Superman, Cowboy, etc.
New lyrics	add funny lyrics to an existing (usually well-known) tune or song - e.g. “Kill the Wabbit”
Fun ways of Creating Music	experimenting with unusual set-ups to generate sounds, prepared pianos to make unexpected sounds, fun use of samples such as dog barks
Fun ways of Playing Music	speeded up or slowed down, very high or low (e.g. Mahler’s Frere-Jacques and Saint-Saens’ The Elephant)
Strange instruments	sousaphone, kazoo, everyday objects

Curious to classify the pieces with my new taxonomy, I have recreated my evening’s experience by making a list of youtube videos of the pieces played and some terse commentary on them.

Schickele - Unbegun symphony

https://youtu.be/9rGVXLNQ3dY?t=1m54s

Funny because of imitation.
Skip to 1m54s if you are impatient.

Mozart - A musical joke finale:presto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLjRDlnbyOw

It’s funny because it contains many over-the-top mistakes.
This yahoo answer provides some examples.

Haydn - The joke finale: presto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmoA5fy_kvQ

The joke is to figure out when this piece ends. Challenge to the listener: without actually watching the youtube video and relying only on the audio, figure out when the piece actually ends.
If you are padentic you can read this Pearson teaching material on this piece.

Happy birthday variations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsdJgHl6CQw

This is funny because it interprets music in an unconventional way.

Anderson - Typewriter

https://youtu.be/nW8dGwa2zRw?t=1m44s

This is funny because it uses strange instruments.
Skip to 1m44s if you are impatient.

P.D.Q Bach

After the intermission, the orchestra played pieces from the fictitious composer P.D.Q Bach invented by Peter Schickele. I’ll link to two of those I found are funnier, both of which are humour arising from musical situations and people.