A Joke A Day A Week, Episode One

I've written a few times on this blog about the inane "A Joke A Day" email service (I'm sure there's more than one) which I would often subscribe to for email accounts that, back in the day, were free but which I never used. Often those email accounts would expire if you didn't have email coming to them, but because I thought it was (at least initially) funny to have email accounts at startrekonline.com & muslimonline.com (both sites, & my email addresses, are long defunct), I'd sign up for an account & then subscribe to the A Joke A Day service. One account I use still gets them, & I rarely read them, but am too lazy to unsubscribe. I recently thought, what if I actually saved them, then featured what I consider the best, or funniest, or worst, or most notable, or simply something to talk about once a week? & so I shall.

The most common A Joke A Day is pretty lame. You've probably heard it before, & I confess to never actually laughing at any A Joke A Day. But this A Joke A Day, from Wednesday the 22nd, is based on a pretty funny pun, but seemed exceptionally clumsy in its execution - & it was familiar:

"When Mozart passed away, he was buried in a churchyard.

"A couple days later, the town drunk was walking through the cemetery & heard some strange noises coming from the area where Mozart was buried. Terrified, the drunk ran & got the priest to come & listen to it. The priest bent close to the grave & heard some faint, unrecognizable music coming from the grave. Frightened, the priest ran & got the town magistrate.

"When the magistrate arrived, he bent his ear to the grave, listened for a moment, & said, 'Ah, yes, that's Mozart's Ninth Symphony, being played backwards.'

"He listened a while longer, & said, 'There's the Eighth Symphony, And it's backwards, too. Most puzzling.'

"So the magistrate kept listening; 'There's the Seventh... the Sixth...the Fifth...'

"Suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on the magistrate; he stood up & announced to the crowd that had gathered in the cemetery. 'My fellow citizens, there's nothing to worry about. It's just Mozart decomposing.'"

I'm not a classical music maven but I do know that the composer most associated with nine symphonies isn't Mozart (who actually composed over forty of them) but Beethoven. I know for the sake of the joke it's just important it's a classical music composer that you recognize, but this does seem especially lazy.

The other thing is, I laughed at this joke the first time I saw it, which happened to be in a The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson:



Suffice it to say, the economy of style Larson had to use makes the pun more impressive, & doesn't require the lengthy set-up. It also doesn't require the weird notion that music played backwards is somehow music returning to its source - & you know, symphonies are played with full orchestras, so you had an prodigious amount of sound returning into the dead composer's head.

(Or so I assume. The joke suggests the music is faint, but I can't imagine it was coming from dead Mozart.)

I am over-analyzing but I'll be doing that on Thursdays from now on. It's fun (for me) to pick apart why something isn't terribly funny. This joke, which probably predates the The Far Side cartoon, is as crumbly & decaying as Mozart in his grave, but there's something I will say at the very end which I find interesting, since many of the A Joke A Day jokes have, like their audience, I suppose, a vague American religiosity & positivity that undermines the best humor's cynical, sarcastic & antisocial punch, & it's this:

You've got a dead dude, & music's coming from his grave, but the town's paid expert on spiritual matters, the priest, is not only "frightened" by the noise coming from the grave - his area of expertise - but he actually runs to the town's secular authority, the magistrate - who handily solves the problem after "listening for a moment." Is this supposed to be a mild criticism of the uselessness of religious folks, who really don't (& frankly can't) know more about death than anyone else? Or maybe it was subconscious?

Even if it's the latter, it makes the joke (for me) better than your average A Joke A Day.