The Indiana Bounce
Most kinds of humor depends upon the old switcheroo: You expect one thing and get another. Puns work this way by deliberately confusing two very different words that sound the same. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest might be one of the most sublime expression of puns in literature, with “earnest” alternating between name and adjective to serve the needs of the story’s hilariously Byzantine plot. Slapstick goes a long way with switching things as well. People are supposed to stand, not fall down. They’re supposed to eat pies in pieces coming at them two miles an hour, not all at once and at twenty. Subtext also works wonders in this regard. Remember the SNL Colonel Angus skit? Those aristocratic Southerners waiting for the good Colonel to come home from the war kept talking about one thing. But by the way they pronounce Colonel Angus’s name in that highfalutin Southern drawl, you realize quickly that they’re talking about something completely different. And the clever way in which this pretext is maintained snowballs the humor for a good five minutes.
The list goes on, of course. My purpose here however is to discuss another kind of comedy, a kind that rarely gets discussed but should. I call it the Indiana Bounce. It’s inspired by Indiana Jones’ reaction to a joke in an often overlooked scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Funniest. Composer. Ever.
So if you’re going to lampoon a classical music composer, that is, one who really lived and isn’t a modern composer’s hilarious alter-ego, then, really, Beethoven comes to mind. The potential for comedy comes up with him as with no other composer.
First, he was deaf. Ha ha. What?
Second, being the embodiment of the Nietzsche’s Ubermenchian ideal, the guy’s life was full of pain and pathos. Oh, the agony! Oh, shut up!
Third, he was an ornery bastard with a (justifiably) inflated ego who took himself quite seriously. It’s easy to make fun of someone like that. A good comic must always pretend to be as grave as the person he is lampooning. But because we all know it’s farce, the gravity instantly becomes risible. There’s a reason why we rarely saw Leslie Nielson smile in any of the Airplane! or Naked Gun movies. His comic effect would evaporate if he did because he would no longer be the match of his subject matter, i.e., Joe Friday from Dragnet. As such, the comic impersonating Beethoven must be immune to humor. And the fact that Beethoven could be such a nasty cuss makes things a lot easier. I mean, let’s face it, it’s easy to laugh at insensitive behavior when you are protected from its direct effects. And, for the sake of good comedy, we can temporarily forget the sweet and mushy aspects of Beethoven’s life, like all that immortal beloved business, since there is no way to spin a good chortle or two out of that.
(And as an aside, the doppelganger of all this is the tragic portrayal of a clown. Of course, Pagliacci comes to mind. Most recently, we can point to Seinfeld star Michael Richards squirming on the David Letterman Show and getting unintended laughs to see how terrifying such a reversal can be.)
Fourth, he (meaning Beethoven) composed the 4 most recognizable notes in all of music. You want to hear a joke that was floating around my third grade class? What was Beethoven’s favorite fruit? Ba na na NAAHHH! Get it? No, really. Get it? Man, that really got us going in Mrs. Pace’s homeroom.
Fifth, he was truly a great composer and one of the most famous artists who ever lived. Everyone knows who he is, and most everyone knows reasons 1 through 4.
No other composer has such a complete comic package as Beethoven.
Bach? He was too nice, too underappreciated and too biologically successful. Vivaldi? Let’s see. A non-celibate monk surrounded by adoring nubile young women. You don’t laugh at a guy like that. A guy like that laughs at you. Haydn? Too happy. Mozart? Too brilliant. Chopin? Too French. Mendelssohn? Too Jewish. Liszt? Too talented. Paganini? Too scary. Schumann? Too crazy. Schubert? Make that Whobert. Verdi? Sure, opera can be lampooned effectively. But that’s because it is opera, not because it is Verdi himself. Salieri? Well, yes, there is potential for lampoonery there. But all the vast majority of us know about him is secondhand and probably inaccurate through the film Amadeus. Anyway it’s no fun pulling down someone who isn’t all that high up on the greatness totem pole to begin with. Remember, with comedy, it’s all about the pratfall, and the bigger the splat in the end, the better.