Tchaikovsky and Why I Write Comedy

For anyone who is curious why I like to combine comedy with my deeper thoughts (if there are any) in Poker Tales, it’s because I wasn’t a very good student until I was 17. Then I learned there there were serious thinkers thinking serious thoughts. But 3 years earlier I had discovered the following Monty Python album in which a concert of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is interrupted by an Emile Gilbert, who keeps breaking violins. Dry, but hilarious.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9H6MdcNFsg

When I got into academia, I couldn’t stop thinking that the whole exercise of looking for deep meanings in literature was not without its compensating comedic moments. In the case of Monty Python, it was Pablo Casals plunging 400 feet into a bucket of boiling fat. In graduate school, it was a “real” professor who told me what literary criticism was “really” about. See the introduction to my forthcoming book on my life after academia.

That is not to say that Monty Pythonites could not be serious about literature. Terry Jones wrote Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery and one of my favorite Chaucer books, Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, which I will cite in my exposition of ‘The Knight’s Tale.’ I, too, have done my share of serious critical work, but Poker Tales is more in line with the fabliaux tales in Chaucer’s masterpiece.

Anyway, here’s the original Tchaikovsky for you humorless purists:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFaq9kTlcaY

For the rest of you, buy my book.