In honor of the day I offer up a few Beethoven jokes. Beethoven himself loved a good joke. According to his pals, no one laughed louder at Beethoven’s jokes than Beethoven himself, who would throw his head back and howl with inappropriately loud laughter. (We are told that Beethoven’s friends invariably laughed along, not because the jokes were funny but because they got such a kick out of Beethoven’s own reaction to them.) The available repertoire of Beethoven jokes is, unfortunately, rather poverty stricken. Out of sheer stubbornness I refuse to relate any joke that concludes with the line, “Oh, that’s just Beethoven decomposing.” Neither will you find any of the various jokes that conclude with the line, “the bassists were loaded in the bottom of the 9th” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger never performs Beethoven because he claims ‘I’ll be Bach’”. Finally, we will not repeat any of the “what’s on the piano stool?/Beethoven’s last movement” jokes here; HEY, I’m trying to maintain a modicum of taste in this blog, okay? Here we go. Having just crossed the road, why did Beethoven kill the chicken? It kept saying ‘Bach, Bach, Bach’. Why couldn’t Beethoven find his composition teacher? Because he was […]