See also Josefa Heifetz’s From Bach to Verse.
Some from Stan Freberg:
Try
The Great Pretender
Sh-Boom
Banana Boat Song
“Lip” synched by characters from Henson’s “Sam and Friends”:
C’est si bon
Maybe Dopers can help me out:
In 1995, a friend gave me a cassette tape of a 30-minute comedic riffing on the song “Barnacle Bill the Sailor.” It alternated between drunken, vulgar verses sung in a gruff pirate-y voice, and funny, satirical commentaries on Barnacle Bill in the voices and styles of well-known people (the ones I remember are Louis Armstrong and William F. Buckley).
Any idea who did this, and is it out there on the interwebs? I was living in the East Bay area of California, in case that helps.
Has anyone mentioned the recently-deceased PDQ Bach, who was definitely the Weird Al of classical music?
Our local AOR station used to air interviews with popular musicians on Sunday evenings in the late 1970s, and one evening, they were interviewing Styx and did indeed play that. I was telling my friends about it at school the next day, and they didn’t believe me.
Yup.
Absolute genius, he was.
Schickele himself was a huge fan of Spike Jones and often mentioned him as an inspiration for his PDQ Bach compositions.
What? No love for Poisoning Pigeons in the Park?
There’s “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” by Julie Brown. I can’t remember the last time I heard this song in the wild.
Tom Lehrer is, in my opinion, a better satirist than Weird Al Yankovic. They are very similar in some ways. Both studied technical subjects in college unrelated to music (and both started college early) and both played a musical instrument before going to college. Lehrer does songs that are more politically based. Lehrer is still alive, I should note.
If we’re going there, we have to go farther back to the Hoffnung Festivals organized by Gerard Hoffnung. Two samples.
Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony, 2nd movement, arranged by Donald Swann (from a 1992 recreation).
A Chopin mazurka arranged for tuba quartet with an intro by Hoffnung (who was a tuba player).
I’m partial to The Ballad of Sara Berry. I’m not sure if this is from a musical or what but it’s another high school prom related murder song. I’m starting to think I might have some unresolved issues.
Rob Cantor sang a song about Shia LaBeouf that is as bizarre as it is hilarious.
Tom Lehrer is certainly more oriented to the political side (as you note) and intellectually pointed, and I love his stuff. He has no predecessors or imitators. Who could possibly rise to his standard?
But Weird Al’s stuff is much closer to Stan Freberg’s. See my earlier post about him. The first on my list there is “Try”, an over-the-top lampoon of Johnny Ray’s “Cry”, and it’s dead on. If it weren’t so funny, it’d be really vicious! Ray was supposedly furious about it. But it turns out that DJs would play Cry followed immediately by Try, and Ray found out this actually boosted his popularity, which had been waning!
Every December, they have a “Tuba Christmas” which is a concert they set up at the malls (there are two large ones here in my fair multi-city) and anyone who plays the tuba, baritone, or euphonium is welcome. They have a brief rehearsal and then play classic Christmas songs. Probably 90% of the participants are under the age of 15, the other 10% are quite likely in the local symphony, and when they’re tuning up, it sounds like a herd of diseased elephants.
However, the concert’s a lot of fun.
Speaking of Swann, Flanders & Swann’s “Ill Wind” is a classic, adding highly amusing lyrics to Mozart’s Horn Concerto.
Continuing on the classical music theme, we also cannot forget the extremely clever Anna Russell, who has quite a lot of excellent material but is best known for her “analysis” of Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle.
There’s also Victor Borge. And this famous sketch from Morecambe and Wise, featuring Andrew Andre Preview Privet Previn.
And of course this:
Joshua Rifkin gave us a spot-on parody of Bach et al. in “The Baroque Beatles Book”:
Wikipedia tries to suggest a few singer/songwriters who are similar to Lehrer in Tom Lehrer - Wikipedia. I don’t think Stan Freberg is closer to Yankovic than Lehrer is. I think that ultimately it’s hopeless to classify singer/songwriters this way. Everybody has their own style which isn’t really that close to anybody else.
Nice! That’s more surprising than Haydn intended, though I suspect he would have enjoyed it.
Reminds me of a joke…
How did Louis XIV feel after he completed the Palace at Versailles?
I remember Bob Rivers and Jamie O’Neill doing a parody of this in April 1989. It was called Lucy’s in the Hospital Dying, with “Lucy” being Lucille Ball. Very tasteless, but I couldn’t help laugh. I can’t seem to find it anywhere on the web, interestingly.