3. P.D.Q. Bach Is Only Funny To The Grammys
Maybe we just don’t get the joke. Four years in a row, the Grammys awarded Best Comedy Album to P.D.Q. Bach, a parody of classical music created by Peter Schickele. P.D.Q. had been around since the 1960s performing his offbeat classical numbers, and for some reason the Grammys choose to repeatedly award him 30 years into his career. Comedy is subjective, but we’re hard pressed to find people outside of the Grammy committee who find this shtick funny, especially over the span of four albums.
The Grammys have a long history of rewarding bad comedy, having awarded two comedy albums Best Album of the Year. We have nothing against the first winner, Bob Newhart, but the second winner, Vaughn Meader, remains the most dated choice in Grammy history. Though Meader’s parody of the Kennedy’s, The First Family, was funny at the time, like with P.D.Q. Bach, you needed to be in a certain mindset to understand the joke, and the world was forever torn away from that mindset after JFK’s assassination.
Comedians who released albums in the years of Bach’s sweep include Bill Hicks, Adam Sandler, Sam Kinison, “Weird” Al Yankovic and Andrew “Dice” Clay.
