
Josh Hawley (R-MO) (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images) "You just put it on, and it just makes anything funnier." "It's just a perfect storm for that song to be considered something that basically has become like a musical condiment, like hot sauce," King said. Now, on top of that simplicity, layer the song's breakneck tempo. "The melody itself is almost like a chitter-chatter, playful laughter kind of thing," he said. Factoring in the melody, he said: "There's a simplicity to it, or maybe a simpleness to it, that is also part of the allure of that song. There's the auditory impression of the saxophone itself, which King describes as a kind of barreling, bawdy instrument. dun-dun, before finishing with, " – and then everybody knows what that means, right?" "When we want to communicate that there's danger in the water, probably a shark, all you have to do is –" he then sings a few of those ominous two notes that have haunted nightmares since 1975, dun-dun. He likens the sonic branding power of "Yakety Sax" to that which we assign to John Williams' theme to " Jaws." That music was written expressly for that movie, he explained, but it ended up branding all sharks.
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His first exposure to "Yakety Sax" was via memes, not "Benny Hill." But it didn't matter that he hadn't seen that show before hearing the song because its comedic association was already established in other contexts, particularly TV comedies such as "The Simpsons" and " Family Guy." Steve Milton, a musicologist and co-founder of the innovation and experience design studio A_DA, echoes this while viewing the tune as a cultural signifier. It's almost like the sound of somebody slipping on a banana peel." Because you've got those musical slides where he's anticipating the down beat. "On a compositional level, it almost sounds like compositional slapstick. "But I also think there's a couple of reasons why the people who put 'The Benny Hill Show' together even used that song," he said in a recent interview. He sees "Benny Hill" as the main reason people associate the melody with "farce, madcap humor, and zany high jinks." King was first exposed to "Yakety Sax" through "The Benny Hill Show," which he watched as a kid growing up in Canada. Jason King, the Chair of New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, has a few theories.
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And that leads us to wonder what it is about this tune that lends it the ability to inject hilarity, appropriate or otherwise, into everything from the benign to the enraging, including the most abhorrently violent movie scenes imaginable. It lends a gentle madcap, somewhat cognitively dissonant vibe to everything from the climactic shootout in "Scarface" to footage of escaped llamas.Īll of which is to say, Americans and Brits have long understood "Yakety Sax" to be the universal theme of lunacy and fecklessness, regardless of whether a person has seen "Benny Hill" or even knows who he was. YouTube is awash with outtakes from horror and action movies, along with local news footage and politicians' gaffes, all set to Randolph's frenetic melody. "There's a punchline in the melody," said Steve Milton. Popularly known as the closing theme to "The Benny Hill Show," a classically British TV sketch show, "Yakety Sax" is an American-born tune that has enjoyed popularity in some form since the early 1960s, both here and abroad. And this is where that so-called "special relationship" comes into play, since the device most popularly used to satirize and shamed each man is the same: Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax." Neither of these events is naturally comedic. 6, 2021, made its debut serving as its closer. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., cowardly fleeing insurrectionists he courted outside the Capitol building on Jan. 6 committee hearing in which footage of Sen.

July is bookended by Boris Johnson's resignation from his position of Britain's prime minister at its start, with the Jan. But the two often synchronize beautifully, as we saw this month. We're frequently reminded of the "special relationship" America shares with Britain, a concept that takes on another meaning in a political context versus that of popular culture.
