The Science Behind Funny Music
Ok, I admit it: I grew up listening to, watching, and adoring “Weird Al” Yankovic. Bad Hair Day was so much a part of my formative years, that I still honestly believe Yankovic’s most brilliant work is Every Thing You Know is Wrong. As I’ve gotten older, and analyzed the lyrics and music a bit, it turns out the nonsense lyrics are incredibly dense with They Might Be Giants references and the chord changes are also common in TMBG songs (especially the secondary submediant in the chorus and the parallel minor modulation in the bridge).
As much as I would love to dive further into the genius of “Weird Al” (which I’m currently planning in a series of essays), his enduring works provide a foundation for the larger topic of humor in music. What exactly makes music “funny?” Jokes based on lyrics are generally easy to explain because they follow rules of language and stories. Musical “jokes,” in contrast, are built on more abstract relationships established through statistical learning and enculturation. Music and language tend to follow similar rules, so it would be helpful to see how jokes are generally set up in language to avoid the music theory rabbit hole.
Anticipation in Jokes and Music
All jokes are essentially the same. Set up an audience’s expectation…then violate it. But it’s not enough to simply say some random line after the set-up, the punchline must be somehow related to the set-up. This can be seen in the Rule of 3’s and in progression jokes like The Aristocrats (Warning: really NSFW). This pattern can also be seen in music.
Music theorist David Huron, in his book Sweet Anticipation, breaks all musical understanding down to anticipating, predicting, and then appraising temporal events. Huron’s basic theory suggests that effective musicians establish patterns for their audiences and then violate that expectation in a way that is unexpected, but not too unexpected. Predictability in music is fairly important and common, so these musical expectations occur subconsciously whether you understand the theoretical underpinnings or not.
But few composers can pull off a purely musical joke. Instead, funny music is often used to accentuate other funny aspects of the performance through contrast. A strong example of this is the juxtaposition of themes in Lonely Island’s collaboration with Michael Bolton, Jack Sparrow. The song is a classic Double Act with Samberg et al. playing the part of the straight man. On its surface, Bolton’s obsession with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise in the middle of a hardcore rap about a group of player’s night out may seem too random, but the group smartly plants the Pirates idea in our heads in the short scene prior to the beginning of the song. Further adding to the continuity, the music throughout is consistent despite the unrelated lyrics. The “big, sexy hook” in the chorus utilizes synthesizer tones that sound like they belong in the verse and the bass part is a stripped-down version of the verse’s hip-hop beat. Consistencies like these aid the listener in linking the two disparate entities and thus accentuating the humor.
Yeah, That Was Kind of Weird, But We’re Back at the Club.
In 2013, Ylvis exploded onto the international music scene with The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?). If you’re an iOS user, even Siri knows the answer to this eternal question. The popularity of The Fox likely stems from its use of schematic violations to accentuate the main joke in the song: Given its popularity, there’s no generally accepted onomatopoetic word for the fox’s sound like “Woof” for a dog or “Moo” for a cow.
A schema in psychology is an expectation of a setting or situation based on past experiences. Schemas exist for pretty much every social phenomenon and often dictate how we act. The way we act at a rock concert is different than at an opera despite them both being social musical events. Location often provides the biggest clue for how we’re expected to act.
Ylvis establishes the “location” for the song through timbral and harmonic elements. Fox opens by letting the listener think they are in for an EDM or Dubstep-style song. This is done with an arpeggiated synthesizer melody over a sparse accompaniment, very similar to Skrillex’s 2010 dubstep hit, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. The verse continues the charade by utilizing a stereotypical EDM drum part with heavy bass on one and three and a snare drum patch on two and four. Halfway through the verse, the opening synth part returns and the snare patch is on every beat. This timbral change, along with a much more syncopated vocal line, builds to a supposed drop…
But the drop doesn’t hit exactly right and the unexpected answer to the eponymous question takes a second to register. This schematic violation requires an appraisal of what just happened in the song. Repeated listening adds even more to the humor because the lyrics are set up like a children’s song about animals. Here is the basic melodic pattern for the verse:
The simple melodic line lends itself well to the overly emotional/introspective vocals, tricking the listener into a schematic expectation of more serious lyrical content. Ylvis plays this for maximum effect in the second verse where the bottom completely drops out and ethereal harmonies accompany lyrics that lovingly tell the fox, “Your fur is red. So beautiful… like an angel in disguise.”
Similar to Lonely Island’s Jack Sparrow, The Fox’s music tells one story and the lyrics tell another. Both music and lyrics work together to set up a schematic expectation for the listener, but then the song takes a sudden left turn toward absurdity. What makes The Fox effective, though, is the way it maintains the EDM and Dubstep schemas throughout, but surprises the audience with continuous violations of musical expectations through lyrical content.
It’s a Mystical Disguise
Long before Jack Black was a box office phenomenon, he and guitarist Kyle Gass performed as the self-proclaimed “Greatest Band on Earth,” Tenacious D. Their song Tribute, while not the band’s most popular hit, contains subtle and smart humor through semantic relationships with other music.
Semantics refer to associations our minds make between two unrelated things. A semantic relationship can also be described as how an idea presents itself in alignment with another. For example, many Americans relate the music of Gioachino Rossini to Looney Tunes and will find Rossini’s music humorous because of this connection. Even though Rossini was writing music a century before Bugs Bunny could lampoon his music while being shot at by Elmer Fudd, modern understanding of early 19th-century Italian opera would be lacking without its modern cartoonish delineation.
Tenacious D utilizes similar semantic relationships to accentuate the humor within Tribute. The main joke of the song is that they are paying tribute to the “greatest song in the world,” but can’t remember how it went. However, careful listening shows they actually do: it’s Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. On the surface, this connection is not that funny, but a deeper analysis of how Tribute makes semantic connections to Stairway for the listener reveals a remarkably well-crafted song.
An earlier version puts the two songs directly together by playing the ubiquitous opening progression as part of their story and directly quoting other chords. The album version of the song utilizes a heavier texture for this section of the song and replaces the direct harmonic reference with a musically unrelated section, likely because Led Zeppelin has been known to sue for copyright infringement.
Despite that change, Tenacious D was able to include plenty of other allusions to the greatest song in the world. One of the more obvious allusions is how both songs begin with solo plucked guitar, build to blistering finales, and finish with a soft landing. Within that finale, the following rhythmic pattern shows up in both the guitar and drums at the end of phrases in both songs:
The syncopated line driving to the downbeat was a favorite of Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, and can be heard numerous times in Tribute. Further, Tribute’s chord progression from the lyric, “This is not the greatest song in the world,” is the descending Am, G, F sequence that lays the foundation for Jimmy Paige’s guitar solo and the final verse of Stairway. So, it turns out that The D did remember the greatest song in the world, just not in a way that violated Led Zeppelin’s intellectual property.
Fans of Tenacious D expect a certain level of heavy metal bravado, but Tribute, like “Weird Al’s” Everything You Know is Wrong, shows unexpected subtlety and depth through its allusions to the source material. The punchline of this musical joke lies in The D’s deft musical sleight of hand that simultaneously winks at the listener.
Jokes often cease being funny once you analyze them because it removes the surprise. But truly effective jokes, like effective music, require craftsmanship so the audience can appreciate elements of the joke beyond the initial surprise. Music adds a layer of expectation to the joke that either provides or accentuates the punchline.
Oh, and for the record, foxes make a hoarse yowling sound.