Comedy music
Popular music artists in the 20th century interested in comedy include Allan Sherman, Frank Zappa, Tiny Tim, Barenaked Ladies, Randy Newman, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
Artists in the 21st century include Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, The Lonely Island, Ninja Sex Party and The Axis of Awesome.
Comedy is a form of art that addresses comic or humorous situations, or even serious ones with a light or satirical approach.
[4] Music is also a form of art, and it is concerned with the rhythm, melody, and harmony of vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds.
The first uses of comedy in music can be traced back to the first century in ancient Greece and Rome, where poets and playwrights entertained with puns and wordplay.
[9] The origins of comedy play in ancient Greece are first recorded on pottery in the 6th century BCE, on which illustrations of actors dressed as horses, satyrs, and dancers in exaggerated costumes are painted on.
[10] Playwrights of comedic theatre include Aristophanes and Menander whose works mocked politicians, philosophers, and fellow artists.
It quickly made its way to France, where it became opéra comique, and eventually, in the following century, French operetta, with Jacques Offenbach as its most accomplished practitioner.
Many countries developed their own genres of comic opera, incorporating the Italian and French models along with their own musical traditions.
In the 1940s, Spike Jones created songs with a comedy technique of replacing several musical notes with humorous sound effects.
Malcolm Arnold's Toy Symphony was first performed at a Savoy Hotel fund raising dinner in London on 28 November 1957, with toy instruments played by a group of eminent composers, musicians and personalities, including Thomas Armstrong, Edric Cundell, Gerard Hoffnung, Eileen Joyce, Steuart Wilson and Leslie Woodgate.
These artists include: Allan Sherman, Shel Silverstein, Frank Zappa, Tiny Tim, and Randy Newman.
For over four decades, he released multiple hit parodies and originals, which made him a major player in the genre of comedy music and the counterculture associated with it.
[9] In 1994, The Actors' Gang members Jack Black and Kyle Gass formed the iconic comedy rock duo Tenacious D[19] and went on to release their debut album in 2001.
[20] At the turn of the millennium, the band Steel Panther formed in Los Angeles with songs, live shows and videos parodying the stereotypical glam metal genre and lifestyle of the 1980s.
[21] In 2001, The Lonely Island formed in Berkeley, California with members Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, who starred in a series of SNL Digital Shorts featuring songs like Motherlover, Dick in a Box, I'm on a Boat, I Just Had Sex and more.
[22] Through the rest of the 2000s, a movement of comedy rock acts started to take place in Australia with bands such as The Axis of Awesome, The Beards, The Kransky Sisters and Tripod.
For three albums, they collaborated with animator and internet personality Arin "Egoraptor" Hanson to create the video game themed side project Starbomb.
[27] In 2010, rappers Peter "Nice Peter" Shukoff and Lloyd "Epic Lloyd" Ahlquist created the web-series Epic Rap Battles of History, a show that pinned famous figures both real and fictional in rap battles against each other.
[28] The beginning of the 2010s saw Nerf Herder front man Parry Gripp starting to release a long series of successful tween pop songs such as "It's Raining Tacos", "Space Unicorn" and "Do You Like Waffles?"
Comedy often contains progressive and subversive messages that intend to provide listeners with information about issues, Injustices, and other topics that are important to the artist.
[1] Both comedy and music have the power to create movements and spread ideas, allowing them to effectively advocate counterculture through the ages, one of them being the challenge of authority.
[1] An example of the implementation of comedy music in education is the incorporation of parody songs to learn the English language.
The use of unexpected juxtapositions of syntactical elements include changing the lengths of phrases, startling turns of melody and dynamics, and contrasting textures.
The use of unusual effects of texture, dynamics, rhythm, and melodic design creates comic features within the music piece.
Examples of this are the exaggerated large intervals of the bass voice in 18th century opera buffa and the two Sopranos showing off their high register singing in Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor composed in 1785.
Composers like Haydn and Beethoven often use specific movement titles to identify their work as humorous, labeling them as 'scherzo', which means 'joke'.
An example of this is a vocal arrangement of Mozart's overture to Die Zauberflote that begins with "Vivat Carl Maria Weber".
Soggetto cavato is a technique that substitutes syllables from solmization for letters, creating a musical cryptogram.
Novelty song is a subgenre of comedy music that is humorous, unique and original, sounding different from everything else being played in the media.
