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Scoring Laughs: A Meditation on Music and Mirth

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The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema

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Abstract

Music as a comedic device is a rather knotty topic. Conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein rightly postulated: ‘It’s a fun subject, but it’s a hard subject: What makes music funny?’ In this introductory chapter, Emile Wennekes notes that scholarly reflection on humour and music predominantly embraces the incongruity theory. Composers have furthermore a multitude of strategies at their disposal to display musical drolleries; the most common techniques used to generate some form of humour within a musical piece are discussed in this contribution. Subsequently, music as comedic device in film music is examined, especially within the comedy genre. Displays of comedic connection here are not limited to text and music but are woven within a gamut of filmic components. It is argued that mirth in film music differs from humour in concert music due to two auxiliary capacities: context and diegesis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Already anticipating the topic of musical humour in cinema, Mark Slobin’s volume Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music (2008) offers a rich textbook on non-Western music, but does not specifically address film musical wit.

  2. 2.

    Trigger warning: this brief overview of example does not in the slightest has the ambition to be considered in any way complete.

  3. 3.

    Thomas Veatch is one of the humour theorists that also incorporates the reaction of the perceiver. He ‘emphasizes that humour is a function of both the situation and the perceiver’s reaction to it’ (Eriksen 2016, p. 236).

  4. 4.

    Based on empirical experiments, Huron defines three infringements that involve ‘schematic expectations’, ‘veridical expectations’ and/or ‘dynamic expectations’, subsequently addressing the manner in which one expects events to evolve, or if one’s anticipation through prior knowledge of the specific musical events is deceived, or indeed when large differences in loudness are perceived (Huron 2006, p. 287) This is part of Huron’s ITPRA theory, defining the subsequent cognitive steps in listening: imagination, tension, prediction, reaction, and appraisal.

  5. 5.

    The laugh in music is studied from multiple angles in Joubert and Le Touzé’s volume Le rire en musique n.d.

  6. 6.

    Scholarly discussions of humour in music can be traced back to Johann Georg Sulzer’s Theorie der schönen Künste (1792). Midway the eighteenth century, ‘Comical music’ was already a separate category of music, comprising ‘frivolous’ sonatas, trios, and concertos by the comic opera. Eggebrecht (1951, pp. 144–152).

  7. 7.

    For examples, see Dalmonte (1995, pp. 169–70).

  8. 8.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efRQh2vspVc. Accessed 10 October 2022.

  9. 9.

    This is one of the examples Leonard Bernstein gave in his 1959 talk.

  10. 10.

    The 3.5-meter-high octobas by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume even made it into Hector Berlioz’s Traité de l’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843).

  11. 11.

    Jazz musicians from the Netherlands were qualified as ‘the louder anarchists, the humourists, the ironists’ in their attitude towards improvised music (Heffley 2005, p. 66).

  12. 12.

    When confronted with derogatory critique, he reposted: ‘producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public.’ (Miles 2004, p. 341).

  13. 13.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpJ6anurfuw

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wiRivDMIYM

  14. 14.

    Monty Python’s Holy Grail starts off with a hilarious ‘fiasco of the credits subtitled in Swedish’ (Day 2002, p. 131)

  15. 15.

    NB: This last sentence is a non-credited, direct quote from Miguel Mera’s essay on film music humour (Cf. Mera 2002, p. 92).

  16. 16.

    This singing could also be considered as a form of what Claudia Gorbman coined as ‘artless singing’ (Gorbman 2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Emile Wennekes

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  1. Emile Wennekes
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Correspondence to Emile Wennekes .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Journalism, Linnaeus University, Kalmar/Växjö, Sweden

    Emilio Audissino

  2. Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Emile Wennekes

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Wennekes, E. (2023). Scoring Laughs: A Meditation on Music and Mirth. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_3

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