Musical jokes in movies

The new film While We're Young starts with a musical joke that had me laughing so hard I could barely breath. I'll spoiler it for people who haven't seen it and plan to. Ben Stiller and his wife are dealing with being a middle aged childless couple, and their friends have a newborn baby. And the soundtrack features:

Spoiler

David Bowie's song Golden Years as a lullaby played on a toy piano

As soon as I recognized the tune, in maybe three notes, I just lost it. My wife didn't recognize the tune and didn't know what I found so funny.

What was strange was that it didn't seem as if anyone else in the theater got the joke.

Any other musical jokes you remember?

 

The song during the closing titles of Boogie Nights is ELO's "Livin' Thing."

 

I took it as a bit of a sick joke that the song the girl in Silence of the Lambs listens to before encountering Buffalo Bill is Tom Petty's "American Girl."

 

Your example reminded me of the scene in Grosse Point Blank where John Cusack finds that his childhood home has been replaced by a convenience store while Guns N Roses' cover of "Live and Let Die" plays. When Cusack goes into the store, it's now a Muzak version of "Live and Let Die" playing.

Just remembered a scene from the recent film Focus that may apply:

Spoiler

The audience believes the main character is going to make a bad choice and start making bets against a high roller. The mood is set by the Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil." It's only after the whole scene is revealed as a con hinging on the high roller choosing the number 55 that the audience also learns that "Sympathy For The Devil" was not just mood music, but actually playing in the room as part of the con. The song was chosen because of the repeated "woo woo" backgrounds, which is supposed to sound like "five five" in the high roller's native tongue.

 

In the Robert Altman movie The Long Goodbye, the title song is played repeatedly throughout the movie, but each time in a different style. When the hero visits the supermarket, for example, it's muzak. In another scene it's lounge jazz, then a hippie chant played on a sitar, etc.

 

I think many/most of these essentially ironical musical references are lost on the audience.

 

I can list a couple from Adam Sandler movies as well.

 

So what's the joke?

 

Never mind, I was probably wrong.

 

Almost too many to list...

 

In Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Damone advises Mark to play the first side of Led Zeppelin IV if he wants to score on his upcoming date. Cut to the date, and we hear "Kashmir."

 

The Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Action Hero has a lot of them. For instance, the main bad guy is played by F. Murray Abraham (Saleri in Amadeus). The kid warned Arnold not to trust him with "He killed Mozart!" and the soundtrack has a heavy metal version of Mozart's Overture to The Marriage of Figaro.

Prizzi's Honor apparently is rich in opera jokes, most of which I didn't get - like Maerose Prizzi telling her father that Charley raped her, with the song O Mio Babbino Caro playing (although I did recognize The Thieving Magpie during a kidnapping).

 

Probably true. I was laughing my head off, but I think I may have been the only person in the theater who was.

Not a musical joke as such, but in O Brother, Where Art Thou the scene where the heroes pick up Tommy Johnson is shot from overhead - at the crossroads where he supposedly sold his soul to the Devil (the film got it right, it was Tommy Johnson, not Robert a generation later). My wife and I were laughing our heads off...and nobody else in the theater was.

 

In a way, many of these somewhat sly song 'inserts' play like an inside joke.

And, after I LOL, impossible to expain the joke post-scene, to one unfamiliar overall.

 

Definitely. After While We're Young, my wife asked me what I was laughing at. I explained, but she didn't laugh.

I don't think anyone has ever laughed at a joke that has just been explained to them. You either "get it" and laugh, or you don't get it - like how it is impossible to tickle yourself.

 

Well, your comment caused me to laugh at how true it is.

 

Thanks!

The only thing in this entire world more tedious than someone explaining a joke, is an academic trying to explain humor...but one of the theories of humor is that it is all about the "twist", where expectations are subverted. That kind of thing is what tends to make me laugh hardest. Other types of humor leave me cold - slapstick and most physical comedy (I've never laughed at the Three Stooges, for example.)

 

I loved that scene where she was just rocking out in her car, making us like her immediately because she was doing something most of us had done when alone.

It's a different thread, but a great example of that was Jack Black in the opening scene of Bernie. His character is singing along to a contemporary gospel song and really getting into it, and you liked this guy immediately.

Patrick Bateman's lectures on the merits of Huey Lewis, Genesis and Whitney Houston in American Psycho don't remind me of this forum. At all. In any way. Nope.

 

First one that comes to mind is the theme from The Crying Game in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

 

And she did just what I do -- sing the harmony vocals! A very nice touch by the director.

 

It's tough to come up with examples of these, other than ones in movies about music (Spinal Tap, Walk Hard) or really obvious ones, like the Chuck Berry joke in Back to the Future.

 

Some of the Bond music jokes were funny. For Bond and Anya walking in the desert in evening wear after Jaws destroys their van, the Lawrence of Arabia theme is inserted.
My favorite: In Moonraker, access to the secret space chemical lab is the famous five notes from Close Encounters. Additionally in For Your Eyes Only, the code to enter the Identigraph is bars from "Nobody Does it Better" which Bond then adds the next two notes.
Most clever: In Licence to Kill, when Bond is hanging on the tanker in the end sequence, the machine gun bullet ricochets sonically make up the James Bond theme. Absolutely wonderful.

 

Maybe not a joke regarding music, but my favorite Marx Brothers routine about musicians.

 

There's a sex scene in Looking for Mr. Goodbar with Donna Summer's Could This Be The Magic that really turns the song into musical pun.

 

I guess this concept would include references slipped into the score that count on the audience's familiarity with the original. Just thought of this because I rewatched The Goonies this weekend and they slipped in music from an Errol Flynn film and the Superman fanfare during the sequence where Sloth arrives at the pirate ship.

I know I've seen other examples of this, but they're not coming to mind right now.