A friend of mine of at the SWC just posted a link through to a YouTube video of a song that used to be a favorite of mine back when I was singing in bars.

As soon as I clicked through, it brought back memories of working and singing in Irish pubs - something I did a fair amount of in my late teens and early 20’s. As the song played, I found myself not only singing along with it but reliving the emotions of performing it in front of hundreds of people. The glare of cheap stage lights, the smell of Irish whiskey run through the coffee machine by the bar owners husband, mingled in with the remembered odor of draft and cigarettes (you could smoke in bars in those day), came rushing back and combined with the jaunty rhythm to create a euphoric performance “high” in my mind. Quite the effect from a recording!

Well, I don’t sing in bars any more (although, sometimes….), and my music performances are just a “touch” more “serious” when I sing with the Ottawa Bach Choir. But, even singing Baroque music with a bunch of fantastic musicians, there is still a lot of humour and downright silliness that goes on behind the scenes (I’d show videos, but I’d probably get shot…). One way that the humour comes out (and I’m not talking about the Miss Sackville contest!) is when spontaneous groups of us start singing “silly” songs like this one

(no, that’s not me, that’s Moxy Fruvis live)

One song I am planning on trying to con my friends in the OBC into adding to our repertoire is this one by another of my favorite Canadian groups, the Arrogant Worms, although there is no way we would perform it in the Thomaskirche!

Amid all the silliness of these songs, there is also an underlying message which fits in with the function of Joking Relationships. Often, silliness, humour and satire are used as social “venting mechanisms” for underlying structural strain points in a society and/or sub-culture. In the choirs I’ve sung with, this usually shows up on tours or after performances. It is a way of handling the stress of performing world class Baroque music in international venues (next year, we will be performing in the Thomaskirche [Bach's Cathedral] in Leipzig, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and Notre Dame in Paris which sould give you an idea of what level” we are performing at…). Singing silly songs, not in the performance venues(!), makes our actual performances better.

I have often used songs and videos in lectures to make points about how some facet of “social reality” works. One of the interesting things about humour, and especially musical humour, is that it actually has a measurable effect on neurotransmitter levels in the brain, increasing naturally produced endorphins and making things seem “brighter”. This actually changes the perceptual fields of an audience (what Charlie Laughlin refers to as the sensorium) by providing a filter of “humour” that distances aggressive responses.

I’ve often found that using musical humour is a fantastic way to illustrate a social-structural strain point, primarily because it allows people to “relax” and perceive the point I am making in a non-threatening way. Let me give a couple of examples of this. When I lecture about social movements, I often talk about them as adaptive responses to changes in the social environment. This is a very nice, rational way of talking about hundreds of thousands of people loosing their jobs and having to go from white collar occupations to learning how to say “would you like fries with that?”. And, having worked as a career counsellor during the disastrous high tech meltdown in Ottawa, I know how badly that affects people, even at second and third hand (many of my students had parents who lost their jobs in that melt-down). So, when I lectured about social movements and economic dislocation, I would often talk about them rationally and, at the same time, play them this song.

If I was talking more about social movements in general, I would usually play a different song.

Now, the really fascinating things about this last song is that it takes all of the logic of one social movement and applies it to a completely different area. In effect, it lampoons the pomposity of some of the extreme animal rights groups by applying the same rhetoric to vegetables (as a note, the Worms sent me a copy of this video long before YouTube existed with specific permission to play it for my students).

Humorous songs are, to paraphrase what my grandmother used to say about politeness, the “Vasaline of social intercourse”. They allow us, as individuals, to handle many of the emotional affects of the inherent contradictions that exist in all human societies and sub-cultures. And when some mechanism for dealing with these contradictions isn’t present, I start to get worried about the health of that society or sub-culture. Without such a mechanism, the people who inhabit that life-world are in danger of becoming too “serious” - of taking on too much of a via positiva stance without any safe guards against fanaticism. With that in mind, I will leave you with three songs from one of the greatest social commentators of the past century. If anyone has any suggestions for additions, please tell me about them.