Music and Humour
We are right in the middle of moving house (if I close my eyes, all I see are bags, boxes, a fridge, cupboards, chairs and other things waiting to be lifted and moved), so unfortunately I have barely been able to take out my ukulele in recent weeks and no new tutorial video could be made. For now I am sharing another favourite video, an excellent example of the fact that jokes and humour absolutely have a place in music. The video below is a special and very witty arrangement of You Don't Bring Me Flowers. The song was made world-famous by Barbra Streisand in 1978 and was later covered by quite a few people — the song, I mean — including Dean Reed and Kati Kovács in a duet in 1980.
As you can see and hear, the arrangement is based on ukuleles that have each been tuned in advance to a specific chord. They are held in front of the singers, whose only job — apart from singing — is simply to brush across the strings. The larger lady's green and red ukuleles are particularly “striking” . Watch the indifference, and the hand and body posture, with which she lifts the two instruments and then strolls away; naturally this too is a carefully worked-out part of the comic performance.
Anyone who plays music themselves, on any instrument, knows how wonderful it feels to insert a little “surprise” into a well-practised piece and put a smile on the audience's face. Once we have played a song a million times on our instrument — in other words, know it thoroughly — we can start thinking about where to sneak in an inventive musical idea that creates an unexpected, humorous effect. It takes a little imagination and creativity.
And when we play with someone else, opportunities for jokes arise almost constantly. Ensemble playing demands enormous concentration — surely it belongs on the podium among the most attention-intensive things a human being can do — and spontaneous laughter often comes from something going wrong without the music actually stopping. Somehow the musicians rescue the situation and keep the performance moving. Funny moments do not arise only from mistakes, of course; they can also come through interaction between the players. If, for example, two musicians alternate improvising in a piece — which requires serious command of the instrument and considerable musical experience — one can repeat a perhaps rather complicated phrase improvised by the other, or turn it into a call-and-response exchange. The result can become a joyful musical battle full of humour. I hope beginner musicians get to experience this as soon as possible, because this form of human communication is unlike anything else. And I hope audiences watching and listening learn to notice and understand the language of musical humour even when it is not as obvious or spelled out as in the video above.
