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How many accordions can you fit in a phone booth?
One hundred and one, if you chop them up fine enough.
What’s the difference between an onion and an accordion?
People shed tears when you chop up an onion.
What’s the difference between a concertina and an accordion?
An accordion takes longer to burn.
What is a bassoon good for?
Kindling for an accordion fire.
If you throw an accordion, a banjo, and a bagpipe off the Empire State Building, which one hits the ground first?
Who cares?
A friend of mine spent the night in a rough section of town. He had to park out on the street, and he left his accordion in the back seat. The next morning he was shocked to see the car’s window was smashed. He looked in and discovered that now there were two accordions in the back seat.
People tell jokes almost everywhere, and as a folklorist trained in the 1970s, tape recorder in hand, I collected them at parties, at work, and in taverns. Of course, nowadays the joke tellers are more active than ever at collecting jokes themselves, using the Internet. I Googled “accordion jokes” and quickly found several versions of the preceding jokes. Jokes denigrating the accordion and a few other musical instruments seem to be widespread. The common theme of such jokes is that they express an intense hostility to the accordion—it ought to be smashed, chopped up, or burned. Owning an accordion is such a misfortune, it seems, that only having two of them could be worse!
Aside from jokes gleefully cheering the destruction of accordions, there are these that emphasize accordion music’s unpopularity:
This accordionist plays a New Year’s Eve gig, and afterward the club owner says, “Great job! Can you play again next year?” The accordionist replies, “Sure. Can I leave my instrument here until then?”
What do you call an accordionist with a beeper?
An optimist.
What is the accordionist’s most requested song?
Play “Far, Far Away.”
What do an accordionist and a true music lover have in common?
Absolutely nothing!
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get away from the accordion concert.
A couple of jokes combine the music’s unpopularity with an extension of the gleeful destruction from the instrument to the accordionist:
What’s the difference between a road-killed skunk and a road-killed accordionist?
The skid marks in front of the skunk.
What do you call twenty-five accordionists buried up to their necks in sand?
Not enough sand.
While these jokes all indicate a popular distaste for squeezeboxes and their players, the mention of bassoons, banjos, and bagpipes in some of the jokes suggests that the accordion isn’t the only instrument to be the butt of this type of joke. Indeed, when I Googled “bagpipe and banjo jokes,” there were even more jokes devoted to these instruments. It was not surprising that frequently there were the identical joke motifs—the chopped up and burned banjos and bagpipes and their optimistic players with a beeper. Most of the time you could fill in the blank with an instrument’s name and the joke still was coherent. Only a few of the abundant jokes are instrument-specific, referring to physical characteristics such as the accordion’s bellows:
What is an accordion good for?
Learning to fold a road map.
What do you call a group of topless female accordionists?
Ladies in Pain.
Why are politicians good accordion players?
They’re used to playing off both ends against the middle.
I found even fewer jokes that refer to the structure or shape of the banjo or the bagpipes:
Why did the Boy Scout take up the banjo?
It makes a good canoe paddle.
An octopus came into a bar where a lot of musicians hang out and said to the bartender, “I’ll bet fifty dollars that I can play any musical instrument in the house.” So a guitarist handed him a guitar, and he played it just like Segovia. A trumpeter handed him a trumpet, and he played it just like Miles Davis. Finally, a Scotsman handed him a bagpipe. The octopus started poking around at it but didn’t play it. “Aha,” said the Scotsman. “You can’t play it.” “Play it?” retorted the octopus. “I was trying to have sex with it, if I could figure out how to take off its pajamas.”
Though only a few jokes refer to the specific shapes of the instruments, a number of jokes are based on the notion that the sounds they produce are horrible. I found the following jokes applied to banjo, bagpipes, and/or accordion:
How is a cat like an accordion?
They both make the same sort of noises when you squeeze them.
What is the difference between an accordion and a South American macaw?
One makes loud obnoxious squawks, and the other is a bird.
There’s nothing like the sound of an accordion, unless it’s the sound of a chicken caught in a vacuum cleaner.
And there are a lot of jokes that the instruments are perpetually out of tune:
How long does it take to get a banjo in tune?
Nobody knows.
What’s the difference between a bagpipe and a chainsaw?
You can tune a chainsaw.
What’s the definition of a minor second?
Two bagpipers trying to play in unison.
While versions of the horrible-sound and out-of-tune jokes are also told on the accordion, they seem less credible or applicable and turn up less frequently. By and large, in all of the despised-instrument jokes the source of disdain is a combination of sonic factors, distaste for the actual sounds they produce, and sociological factors, the perception that the instruments and their players are unpopular, stupid, unskilled, or geekish. It is easier to justify the sonic factors for the bagpipes and banjo. To someone who, unlike me, has not learned to adore the sound of the bagpipe’s shrill reeds or the banjo’s piercing metallic plunk, just listening to the instruments might be unpleasant. The accordion, however, is a mechanical, automated music-making machine manufactured to produce a euphonious sound. Its reeds are pretuned by the maker and seldom need tuning. Pressing the left-hand buttons produces preset harmonious chords. It is difficult—nearly impossible—for a player to make the reeds squawk. There is no sound that can come from the accordion that would be inherently grating to anyone imbued with the aesthetics of Western music like, for example, the screech of the bow on the strings of the novice violin student or the blat of a beginner on trumpet.
Sociological factors must have played the dominant role in assigning the accordion to the realm of despised instruments. Indeed, from its invention in the nineteenth century, the accordion never attained the respect of the elite class. It was a clever mechanical musical gadget. The accordion fad was in tune with the later nineteenth century’s fascination with mechanization. Lacking a venerable pedigree, the accordion caught on among the less well-heeled part of the emerging middle class and the more plebeian working classes, and the instrument certainly was never accepted as a peer of the established classical orchestral instruments. An editorial in the New York Times of August 18, 1877, asserted, “the so-called musical instrument variously known as the accordion or concertina [is the] favorite instrument of the idle and depraved.”
It is noteworthy that at the time this editorial was penned, the popularity of another free-reed, keyboard-controlled, air-pumped musical instrument that sounded much like an accordion, the reed organ, was burgeoning. Dozens of companies in New England and the Midwest, such as Whitney and Holmes, Story and Clark, and the longest-lived, the Espie Organ Company of Brattleboro, Vermont, turned out millions of reed organs. Straddling the realms of sacred church music and secular parlor music for the genteel class, the “parlor” organs were elegant Victorian pieces of furniture. Many were constructed with a high back, often decorated with mirrors and bric-a-brac shelves edged by intricate turned-wood railings. The organ builders also manufactured an even more accordion-like but less ornate product, portable reed organs that folded up into a case about the size of a steamer trunk—just the thing for a missionary headed to “savage lands.” And guess what? Despite the organs’ similarity in sound to the accordion, I can’t find any jokes about reed organs or even their successors, electric organs.
Accordions and accordion players are mocked first and foremost because of their class and cultural associations. In the United States, squeezeboxes are firmly associated with central, eastern, and southern European immigrants and their progeny, a core working-class population of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The predominantly WASP elite was not about to allow even the most financially successful members of these groups into their country clubs. When discrimination against Italians, Slavs, and Jews eased after World War II, when the definition of “white” was expanded to include these lesser European races, accordion music made a brief foray toward becoming a form of mainstream popular music, with Frankie Yankovic leading the charge. But by 1955, Yankovic and his ilk were chased back into their ethnic strongholds, castigated as uncool amid the popularization of African American blues, the music of a still more exploited culture group. As in the Jazz Age thirty years earlier, black music was repackaged, this time as rock ’n’ roll, with Elvis Presley as its white standard bearer. The electric guitar has been “in” ever since, and the accordion is considered decidedly unsexy. Hence this joke:
What do accordion players use for contraceptives?
Their personalities.
The message was clear: “You lesser Europeans can ascend from the working to the middle class, but don’t try to bring any of your ridiculous cultures with you. Leave the accordions behind!”
So just remember:
What do people say when a ship loaded with accordions sinks to the bottom of the ocean?
Well, that’s a start.