LOL!
Animated graphical score of The Flight of the Bumblebee:
I've been watching [several](https://www.youtube.com/user/smalin/videos?disable_polymer=1) of these animated scores recently. They are very well done.Now I can say I’ve heard it. Quite distinctive - now I’m completely sure I’d never heard it before.
ioioio (by priest and people sungen): Why did you laugh when you heard that this needs no introduction? Isn’t it just because it’s pretty well known? Is there a joke I’m missing? If they’d said “needs no introduction” and then played Also Sprach Zarathustra without its introduction, or played Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso which ha ha doesn’t need one because it already is one, those could potentially be laugh material…
I probably would. Because I listened to the old Green Hornet radio shows a few years ago.
That’s about the only classical piece that would be humorous.
Well, there’s this.
Listen to the first few minutes of Shostakovich’s 5th symphony and try saying there’s nothing funny about it. 
True, but how many people can name those out of hand?
Whoo boy…there’s a lot of classical repertoire with humor in it, even if we’re deliberately excluding comic opera and other comedic vocal works. Some of it is subtle, some of it is blatant, some of it was a lot funnier at the time it was written, but there’s plenty of it out there.
Hell, even Beethoven’s Ninth has a few musical jokes worked in, one of the more obvious ones being having a little Janissary band march through the middle of the last movement for no particular reason. And Mozart literally wrote a piece called “The Musical Joke”.
Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals has a lot of jokes in it, too.
More classical music that needs no introduction:
Beethoven: Moonlight Sonata, chorale from 9th Symphony
Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata (FULL) - YouTube
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 "Choral" (Finale) - YouTube
Brahams: Lullaby
Johannes Brahms - Lullaby - YouTube
Greig: In the Hall of the Mountain King
Grieg - In the Hall of the Mountain King - YouTube
Verdi: Dies Irae
Verdi: Requiem, Dies irae - YouTube
Strauss: The Blue Danube
Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube Waltz - YouTube
Tchaikovsky: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / Nina Kaptsova - Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy / 2010 - YouTube
I have a feeling Mozart’s “Leck mich im Arsch” (“Lick me in the ass”) was somewhat intended to be tongue-in-cheek.
I giggled. I tried really hard not to, though. And again just now.
No humor, per se, but a definite surprise:
"Flight of the Bumblebee" and its modern day counterpart "The Bumble Boogie" as interpreted by a master:
So did the host identify the piece after the fact, and/or discuss the particular recording?
Otherwise, that sounds like a good way to alienate people who may not be familiar with classical music and are tuning to learn.
“If you don’t know what this is, then you shouldn’t be listening to our station. Ha ha ha!”
Well, and of course that piece of classical music doggerel by Nigel Tufnels.
[quote=“Dropo, post:56, topic:816111”]
No humor, per se, but a definite surprise:
[/quote] The same music, with humor, from the 1961 Hoffnung Music Festival (arranged by Donald Swann): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0mu7Ccrr60