MUSIC-ENGENDERED LAUGHTER: AN ANALYSIS OF HUMOR DEVICES IN PDQ BACH David Huron School of Music, Ohio State University ABSTRACT Live recordings of Peter Schickele's music were examined and 629 instances of audience laughter were identified. Each of the laughter-evoking moments was analyzed to determine possible reasons why listeners might have laughed. Excluding visual gags and language-based humor, the musical devices used by Schickele appear to fall into nine categories. All of the devices used by Schickele involve violations of expectation. A plausible physiological explanation can be offered for why listeners respond to some dramatic violations of expectation by producing the distinctive "ha-ha-ha ..." vocalization. 1. INTRODUCTION It is relatively rare that people will exhibit gross behaviors while listening to music. Among the handful of behaviors that can be observed unaided are dancing, foot-tapping, clapping, swaying, humming, weaping, smiling and laughing. Laughter is predominantly a social response, but its underlying physiology appears to be universal. The distinctive "ha-ha-ha..." vocalization is produced even by congenitally deaf individuals, suggesting that the response is an innate respiratory reflex (Provine, 2000). There are different types of laughter, including nervous laughter, slap-stick laughter, sadistic laughter (Schadenfreude), mocking laughter, surprise laughter, social laughter, and humor laughter. Interestingly, all of these forms of laughter appear to involve some element of surprise, usually an innocuous twist or violation of some established norm. Comedy has long played a role in music-making. In Western music, opera buffa and Gilbert-and-Sullivan-like operetta have been popular forms of musical comedy. From time-to-time, composers have engaged in overt humor within a purely instrumental idiom. Famous examples include Haydn's Joke quartet (Opus 33, No. 2 in E-flat ) and Mozart's Ein musikalischer Spass (A Musical Joke), K. 522 (Mull, 1949; Wheelock, 1992). Music scholars have offered a number of observations concerning musical humor (Dalmonte, 1995; Johnson & Moore, 2001; Lister, 1997; Mera, 2002; Minamino, 2001; Smith, 1994), including observations regarding musical humor in non-Western cultures (e.g. Sutton, 1997). In modern times, a number of musicians have pursued professional careers exclusively in the realm of musical comedy. Pianist-comedian Victor Borge and Anna Russell readily come to mind. But most of their humor relies on spoken monologue mixed with musical examples. If we exclude language-based humor, only a handful of professional musical humorists remain. Among these is the composer Peter Schickele. Schickele is a classically trained composer whose work is centered around a fictional alter-ego character named "P.D.Q. Bach". Schickele has been prolific in his compositional output as a humorist -- writing nearly a hundred works, from The O.K. Chorale to the Erotica Variations. Schickele's music provides a useful corpus for the study of musical humor. Some of the humor devices used by Schickele involve visual gags. For example, Schickele's Pervertimento includes a stationary bicycle outfitted with a pitch generator. The pitch is increased or decreased by pedalling faster or slower. Part of the humor arises from the melodic requirement for the performer t o pedal very fast. Other aspects of Schickele's music depend on plays on vocal text. For example, in Schickele's Ground Rounds , The words sung by the baritone and by the tenor are innocuous madrigal clichés. However, when the two texts are interleaved so the tenor sings one word, followed by a word from the baritone, the result is lewd or ribald. But beyond the visual gags and language-based humor, most of Schickele's humor devices are to be found in the core musical domains of pitch, time and timbre. 2. CLASSIFICATION Excluding visual gags and language-based joking, informal observation suggests that humor-evoking devices might be classified into nine categories. Incongruous Sounds. In his works, Schickele often makes use of unusual sound sources such as duck-whistles, kazoos, and slide whistles. His Sinfonia Concertante, for example, is composed for string orchestra and six solo instruments: lute, balalaika, ocarina, sewer pipe, double-reed slide music stand, and bagpipe. These sounds are out-of-place in an orchestra. The humor may derive from the incongruity of the sounds. Very few of Schickele's works are written exclusively for bizarre instrumentation. Typically, Schickele will mix some bizarre instrument with the conventional instruments of the classical orchestra. It is possible that the sound of the classical orchestra provides a foil against which the unconventional sounds appear especially incongruous. That is, the normal orchestral timbres may function like the "straight man" in a comedy duo. The sounds of the orchestra evoke conventional symphonic listening schemas that make ISBN 1-876346-50-7 © 2004 ICMPC 700