The Damn Daniel Chronicles: The Far Reaches

WARNING: If you somehow managed to stumble upon here without coming from the impressions jam, Go back if you value your sanity. You have been warned

Link to full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ZVO8vCmA_W4QxTOkzCOmLx_peJI3R8l

There is a story but if you want to just read the informative part on what makes bad music bad. It will just be the list below "Damn Daniel's Horrific Idea".

Damn Daniel's Horrific Idea - The protagonist, "Damn Daniel", wonders just how far he can horrifically twist the theme. His mind wanders to many places, but it's not until he gets into the bath that a magnificent idea becomes clear. He grabs the pen and paper he had on standby and decides to write down what he calls "5 concepts of comedic 'music'" in which he defines as "a far reach from music". What Damn Daniel creates is horrific but also beautiful at the same time. The concepts are listed below:

---Familiarity - Familiarity is the basis of comedic music and encapsulates all of the concepts. It is in familiarity that we usually decide what is good and bad. It is in familiarity that we associate certain sounds with comedy. Some ideas of comedy will break familiar concepts, while some comedic ideas are truly only brought out from familiarity. Many comedic pieces often take familiar songs or concepts and twist them into a more comedic version, Damn Daniel remixes are an obvious example but certain creators like "Weird Al" are known to parody familiar songs as well.

---Absurdity - Whether it be an unusual sound, a strange concept, or an off-beat rhythm that takes the term a bit too literally. Absurdity ties back into familiarity by bringing something unfamiliar to music. I saw a video recently of a (rock?) band performing a cover of a song (I'm unsure which). It was going normal until suddenly, when a crash cymbal was expected, the drummer used their drumpad instead to play a Taco Bell sound. The singer could barely hold in their laughter. I feel another good example is the song "Work Harder" by Austin Jorgensen (Creator of Lisa the Painful), with the song based entirely on a grunt sample to convey a gym-like environment. There's many tracks from "Lisa: The Painful" that seem to emphasize comedic intent through absurd sounds.

---Contrast - Contrast is something that is important in nearly all genres of music, or art for that matter. Having contrasting elements can better emphasize things and bring them out. While a comedic piece can be an entirely chaotic mess, you will rarely see this; There is nearly always some semblance of something familiar to be contrasted with something unfamiliar. Going back to traditional music concepts, there are many layers of contrast, you can see this with ideas like loud vs soft, dissonant vs harmonious, fast vs slow. In my tracks, you will probably hear a silly instrument at a more serious part of the song, but it has been developed to be sort of "familiar" in the moment so it likely won't be as funny as other times. Jokes can get overplayed, and I have 4 songs that sample the same silly "Damn Daniel" audio, so I try not to exhaust those moments by making sure it blends in or contrasts with the music when it needs to.

---Context - These are the lyrics, the stories, the actions, etc. that accompany the music. While not all comedic music needs to have a context, and still remain funny, I like to view no context as something similar to a joke that is only a punchline. One of Joseph Haydn's pieces "Farewell symphony(Symphony no 45)" is a great example of the importance of context. If you were to give it a listen without seeing the performance, it would be difficult to identify any sort of comedic element. But witnessing it, you would see a composer slowly losing all his musicians as they abandon the stage. Originally meant to be a lighthearted way to tell a prince, "the musicians want to go home". Haydn implemented a comedic context to the song that people still laugh at today.

---Characterization - Characterization is in music often. You will see it often through many genres with something like motifs or recurring instrumentation, but in comedic music, characterization can lean on the side of more extreme. Intentional mistakes to humanize, pitch-bending to emphasize action, etc. Characterization in comedic music can give intent/action that can be interpreted very literally through the music, almost on the line of being called a sound effect instead. With extreme characterization though, context is incredibly important. You will often see characterization emphasized in older media that use minimal dialogue. Older "Looney Tunes" episodes have some great examples of highly characterized music.

---Conclusion - While there are many ideas in comedic music. Comedic music is something that breaks convention but also leans into convention as well. With a main emphasis on humor, sacrificing nearly every element or barely any elements can still be found appropriate to the genre. One could maybe call it a far reach from traditional music. And thanks for reading this, I don't think it is complete in-depth look into comedic music, and I maybe could've better spent my time studying for upcoming exams, but I enjoyed writing this and composing around these ideas.

**list ends here

Damn Daniel and the TV remote - Damn Daniel tries to reach for his remote but it is on the table which is very far.

Damn Daniel and The TV Show - Damn Daniel wants to watch a dark show he's never seen before and decides to put on "Happy Tree Friends". However, he exhausted his energy trying to get the remote earlier and now very dramatically fights off his sleep. He is also incredibly determined to type an opinionated review with a typewriter. He ends up only watching the intro with an overly excessive amount of skipping and rewinding. Damn Daniel then reaches to the conclusion that "Happy Tree Friends" is just a kids show, and turns it off.

Damn Daniel and The Internet Opinion (featuring Chopin)- Peeved from the disappointment of his show, Damn Daniel decides he wants to post the summarized opinion, "Happy Tree Friends is just a kids show", on the internet. He is also somehow incredibly horrible - like horrendously bad at typing on a keyboard, that it takes him many keystrokes to articulate his 8 word opinion. Because of his ridiculous struggle with typing, he decides to put on a piano piece that is easy to sing along to. His opinion reaches a far audience and many people believe his opinion without second thought. Many horrified mothers were created later that day.

That concludes the story of Damn Daniel, and the many far reaches he made that day.

Summary:

"Damn Daniel", the protagonist, derives some concepts from what he thinks makes comedic music funny and decides to create a far reach of what you could call "music". He then uses that to makes many different Far Reaches(A literal far reach to grab a TV remote, an assumption from a small basis making it a far reach, and an opinion that reaches a far audience).

Edited on 3/17/2025