Comedy in Song

George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin brought you to the theater to laugh; the word "musicals" is short for "musical comedies." Though laughter is no longer a requirement on Broadway today, the tradition goes back at least to the comic operas of Mozart and Rossini or the satires of Gilbert and Sullivan. And you don't even need a theater; the songbook is packed with numbers that are funny in their own right, whether performed in a club or heard on a 78 rpm record. Comedy can take the form of outrageous farces that make you laugh out loud, but it can also be quite subtle, evoking the smile of wry recognition rather than the belly laugh. We will try to break this down, looking at comedy of all kinds over a wide range of media; the only requirement is that it should involve singers delivering well-crafted words, preferably in a staged context