Musical Gag: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

* In music, a Musical Gag is a joke that comes from somewhere other than the lyrics.

 

To avoid excessive repetition, examples on this page should be of Musical Gags that don't already fit into the specific tropes above.

{{examples}}

* Peter Schickele, a composer who moonlights as a musical satirist, has created a number of compact discs purporting to follow the work of "[[PDQ Bach]]", a fictional classical composer. Every one of PDQ Bach's works is actually filled with as many Musical Gags as Schickele could fit in, be it including the melody of "Pop Goes the Weasel" or an [[Overly Long Gag]] consisting of going up and down the 5-note scale and adding in increasingly nonsensical instruments. Much to his dismay, these musical parodies have become so popular that they have eclipsed his serious work.

* Mozart himself wrote a piece entitled ''A Musical Joke''. There are a few wrong notes, but most of the joke is how the piece fails to develop (as if it were written by someone who was out of ideas).

* Camille Saint-Saens included a number of musical gags in ''The Carnival of the Animals''. For example, movement twelve, "Fossils", includes quotes from ''Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'' and the French nursery rhyme ''Au Clair de la Lune'', among other musical "fossils".

* The [[Led Zeppelin]] song "The Crunge" consists entirely of this trope. It is written to sound like James Brown style [[Funk]], which is written to be danced to, but there are so many changes in the time signature that any attempt to actually dance to it would result in a faceplant.

 

 

* ''[[Hello Cheeky]]'' would have one or two humorous songs in each episode. One of them, ''I've Fallen For A Girl Called Agnes'', is entirely about the fact that ''[[Least Rhymable Word|nothing]]'' [[Least Rhymable Word|rhymes with Agnes]], and the rhythm of the song keeps changing in reference to the fact that the singer never finishes a verse.

 

* ''Chee-Chee'', a famous musical flop by Rodgers and Hart based on the novel ''The Son of the Grand Eunuch'', has a final scene where the main character is being taken away to have the relevant operation. The orchestra plays a few bars from ''The Nutcracker Suite''.

* In the musical ''[[Of Thee I Sing]]'', the French soldiers enter to the first few bars of "An American in Paris." (Both were composed by George Gershwin.)

 

* In ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'', the [[Five-Man Band]] calls itself the "SOS Brigade". One of the [[Image Song|image songs]]' beat is the Morse Code for "SOS".

 

* In ''[[Spaceballs]]'', the [[Overly Long Gag|pan across the Spaceballs' ship]] is made even funnier by the orchestra repeatedly trying to segue into the next part of the music only to find out that there's more of the ship to get past first.

* In the movie ''[[Down With Love]]'', a character claims that something doesn't ring a bell. The soundtrack contradicts him.

 

* Much of the [[Source Music]] chosen for ''[[Lost]]'' was recorded by artists who died in plane crashes.

 

 

** Also, since ''Clue'' has a local pianist in the form of Colin Sell, he sometimes joins in on the joke-cracking. As one round of ''Just A Minim'' collapsed into shambles, he could be heard playing ''Enter The Gladiators'' (circus music), and you can sometimes hear him pausing as he's thrown off by one of the panellists or has to adjust his tempo.

 

 

* On the original ''[[Skies of Arcadia]]'' Dreamcast discs, if you inserted one in a CD player, instead of the standard "Insert Dreamcast discs into your Dreamcast not your CD player" message, one of three randomly selected custom messages to this effect issued by the voice actors for Vyse, Aika, and Fina would play.

{{quote|"Track one contains computer data, so please don't play it. But you probably won't listen to me anyway, will you?" * cue music with [[Evil Laugh|EvilLaughs]]* }}

 

 

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