From the musical stylings of \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic to sarcasm found in John Lennon\u2019s protest songs, humour \u2014 both intentional and otherwise \u2014 runs deep in popular music.<\/p>\n
In his latest project, Associate Professor Nick Baxter-Moore of Brock\u2019s Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film (CPCF) looks at the close and recurring relationship between humour and popular music over the past century.<\/p>\n
The recently published Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor<\/em>, co-edited by Baxter-Moore and Thomas M. Kitts of St. John\u2019s University, explores the essential part of human expression and its connection to song.<\/p>\n \u201cThe book is about musicians who use humour to reach audiences, rather than comedians who use music,\u201d Baxter-Moore says. \u201cWe weren\u2019t writing about Monty Python\u2019s Lumberjack Song<\/em>, for example. Our principal interest is how popular musicians use humour for various reasons and in various ways.\u201d<\/p>\n The 44-chapter book touches on topics such as parody and satire; humour in rock and global music; gender, sexuality and politics; and music mockumentaries.<\/p>\n While Popular Music and Humor<\/em> features contributors and perspectives from around the globe, the book represents a significant Canadian presence, including entries from several current and former Brock faculty members.<\/p>\n Former CPCF Chair and longtime Brock professor Scott Henderson contributed a chapter on Frank Zappa\u2019s 200 Motels<\/em>. Associate Professor Peter Lester co-wrote a chapter on the genealogy of the music mockumentary. Former CPCF faculty member Andy Bennett, now at Griffith University in Australia, wrote about clown figures in rock music of the 1970s.<\/p>\n Baxter-Moore\u2019s own chapter looks at protest songs and explores how some musicians \u201cused humour or metaphor and analogy and other poetic vehicles as a way of communicating with their audience and telling a particular story.\u201d<\/p>\n The perception of humour is subjective, Baxter-Moore explains. For him, John Lennon\u2019s humorous protest songs are more appealing than the more commercially successful but \u201cterribly, terribly earnest\u201d Imagine<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cSome protest songs make you want to laugh, not necessarily because they\u2019re funny in a traditional sense but because they have so much spirit and life in them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Baxter-Moore points to Joni Mitchell\u2019s Big Yellow Taxi <\/em>as an example. The song \u201cspeeds along at such a clip and, although she\u2019s telling a very, very serious story, she seems to find such joy in doing it,\u201d he says. \u201cThen at the end, of course, she bursts out in a peal of laughter.\u201d<\/p>\n The chapter focused on what he calls the \u201cclassic age of protest songs,\u201d but, he says, there are lots of contemporary examples as well, especially within hip hop.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time there is a large gathering of protesters, whether it\u2019s against Trump or in favour of environmental issues, or about Indigenous issues in Canada, you\u2019re pretty much always going to find people singing songs \u2014 some old, some new and some with new words to old tunes.\u201d<\/p>\n Popular Music and Humor<\/em> offers something for \u201call kinds of readers to relate to,\u201d says Baxter-Moore. Chapters look at humour across a range of genres, from metal, reggae and K-pop, to the music of artists such as Chuck Berry, Dolly Parton and \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic.<\/p>\n \u201cWe often think of humour as something that\u2019s mostly verbal,\u201d he says. \u201cBut in his chapter on jazz, for example, Garth Alper finds humour purely in the way the music is played and manages to convey that, in his own humorous way, to a wider audience that goes beyond musicologists and jazz fans.\u201d<\/p>\n Although compiling a book of this scope was challenging, Baxter-Moore admits there were moments of levity. Pulling together the final chapter, \u201cCoda: Unintentional Humor in Popular Music,\u201d was the most fun, he says.<\/p>\n As lead author, he invited contributors to nominate up to three songs they find unintentionally humorous. Several people mentioned \u201creally sappy songs\u201d like Honey<\/em>, made famous by singer Bobby Goldsboro, as well as \u201canything by Star Trek\u2019s<\/em> William Shatner (Captain Kirk) or Leonard Nimoy (First Officer Spock),\u201d he says. \u201cThose are all really, really bad.\u201d<\/p>\n But there was some debate, too.<\/p>\n \u201cAt least 10 people sent in MacArthur Park<\/em>, but then somebody else defended it as a brilliant piece of songwriting,\u201d he says. \u201cI think every reader will find something to which they can relate, or hate, in that chapter.\u201d<\/p>\n As with one\u2019s sense of humour generally, \u201cfinding unintentional humour is something determined by one\u2019s own tastes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the musical stylings of \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic to sarcasm found in John Lennon\u2019s protest songs, humour \u2014 both intentional and otherwise \u2014 runs deep in popular music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":59308,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,1,4,38],"tags":[153,1434,8106,8103,8104,8107,8105,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59307"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59318,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59307\/revisions\/59318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}