I chuckled a while back when I read that the comedian Soupy Sales had died. I wasn’t happy at the thought of Mr. Sales’ death; I was smiling with the recollection of Sales’ signature gag: a pie in the face. In Sales’ TV show of the mid-sixties, celebrities would often appear in skits or banter with Sales. At some point in the show, they would invariably receive a pie in the face. Everyone watching the show knew the pie was coming; the anticipation of what was to come and in being in on the joke, belonging to the group that knew what was to come, was part of the fun. The mock surprise, horror or anger expressed by the celebrity, the exaggerated show of wiping off the pie from his or her face, the fact that a well coiffed handsome or beautiful person was despoiled by banana cream pie, were funny, because a context was created with the skit or banter and broken with an incongruous act, the pie in the face. Perhaps a kind of schadenfreude was at work—the pleasure in seeing those envied brought low.
A fine example of humor that combines many of the comedic techniques discussed (expectation, exaggeration, incongruous acts, elites brought low) in a musical context is the animated film, Long-Haired Hare, starring Bugs Bunny. The title is amusing in that it is a pun on longhairs, a term of derision for those who devotedly listen to classical music. Carl Stalling, the musical director of the animated short, begins the opera parody in the title sequence. He twists Rossini’s aria, “Largo al Factotum,” with the employment of bawdy muted horns and tin-whistle, non-traditional symphonic instruments, which create a banana-peel-slip effect: a musical slapstick and pratfall that foreshadows what is to come in the context of the cartoon, a lampoon of opera and the elitists who listen and practice opera.
The central incongruity of the short film is fashioned in the juxtaposition of two opposites, Giovanni Jones, a famous though fictitious baritone, rehearsing Largo al Factotum in his home with an off-screen pianist and Bugs, lounging over his rabbit hole, singing “A Rainy Night in Rio” and accompanying himself on banjo. In the first few minutes of the short, Stallings has set up a system in which the urbane Jones and opera are symbols of elitism, while Bugs and popular music represent the common man.
