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On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements pp 189–207Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Humor’s Role in Mashups and Remixes: Similarities Between Humor Structure and Remix Structure

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Part of the book series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity ((PMCI))

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of humor in user-generated remixes by turning to humor theories developed primarily by scholars within the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. While the dominating theories of humor are limited to verbal humor, they also prove useful to the study of audiovisual remixes. By providing close analyses of three different forms of remixes (musical mashups, songifications, and lip-syncing), this chapter explores the way in which remixes are often constructed in a manner reminiscent of the structure of jokes (although this does not mean that humor is central to all remixes). The chapter aims at contributing to a broader understanding of remixes’ enormous and enduring popularity, and to illuminate the continuing benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of popular music.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an extended analysis of the mashup “Psychosocial Baby,” see Brøvig-Hanssen (2016).

  2. 2.

    The sonic effect of songification is similar to the AutoTune effect associated with Cher’s “Believe” from 1998, or with the rapper T-Pain, but, instead of merely correcting the audio track’s tuning of pitches, the technology goes a step further and transforms a spoken track into a sung track by means of shifting the pitches, thus creating a new melody.

  3. 3.

    The Gregory Brothers’ songifications can be found on their YouTube channel Schmojoho.

  4. 4.

    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw.

  5. 5.

    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=bFEoMO0pc7k.

  6. 6.

    For examples of such memes, see Prakash (2016).

  7. 7.

    Pavert was already known under the name LuckyTV for providing short news spoofs that were regularly broadcasted during the closing sequences of the daily Dutch TV talk show De Wereld Draait Door.

  8. 8.

    For an extended analysis of the remix “Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton ‘Time of My Life,’” see Brøvig-Hanssen and Sinnreich (forthcoming 2020).

  9. 9.

    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB2zoidUeLU.

  10. 10.

    DWDD’s posting of the video has already had 3 million views, but the fact that the video is also posted on other YouTube channels makes it difficult to total the views (for example, YouTube channel ReChemical indicates that the remix video has gained 4.1 million views there).

  11. 11.

    See Brøvig-Hanssen and Sinnreich (forthcoming 2020) for examples of how this is done in several Trump remixes.

  12. 12.

    In fact, Wilkins (the “unintentional singer” of this remix) unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit against the Bob Rivers Show (a Seattle-based radio program), which had produced and published a similar remix of this same clip, and Apple, which agreed to sell it on iTunes, claiming that the remix was guilty of plagiaristic sampling, fraud, and negligence, as she had not given permission for this use or received any form of financial compensation. For more on this, see Wong (2014).

  13. 13.

    In her article on Gregory Brother’s “Bed Intruder Song,” Alexandrina Agloro goes so far as to argue that this songification is an updated version of the racial structures and horrible stereotyping of the traditional coon songs and blackface minstrelsy shows in the early nineteenth and twentieth century (Agloro 2011).

  14. 14.

    This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 262762, and through the research project MASHED, project number 275441.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, and the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

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  1. Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen
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Correspondence to Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Nick Braae

  2. Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway

    Kai Arne Hansen

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Brøvig-Hanssen, R. (2019). Humor’s Role in Mashups and Remixes: Similarities Between Humor Structure and Remix Structure. In: Braae, N., Hansen, K. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_10

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