I believe that 'play' is the most important value in creativity and composition. I don't mean 'playing an instrument' – what I'm talking about is imagining, combining, highlighting and contrasting relationships between people and objects and the occasionally absurd things that bring us contemplation, entertainment, and joy. As children we create games based on made-up rules, then temporarily live in the worlds that those rules govern. Often, the rules we're bound to have funny consequences. I like to imagine my music in these terms and find the most interesting musical outcomes of my made-up rules.
Here's a classic example of Haydn distorting rules of musical form and expectation as he overshoots the expected resolution of the piece and ends partway into the next statement of the theme (skip to 2:44 for the "joke"):
On the other hand, I'm usually not a huge fan of funny music. It's a blurry line between "playful music" and "funny music" (i.e. music in which the goal is comedy). The two contain each other so often it's not worth trying to define boundaries, but I'd argue that most parodies fall under the "funny music" category – their main source of humor is in contrasting new lyrical content to an already-known song, with as many jokes crammed in as possible. Don't get me wrong, parodies can be FUN, but they tend to be disposable, often empty containers. Which is OK! Just not where I want to dedicate my time.
Which brings me to a man who I don't know how to categorize – Reggie Watts. His music and stage performances are playful as well as funny (pretty hilarious actually), he's a great musician and vocalist who uses looping technology to improvise pieces with rich musical fluency and expressiveness. His humor (musical and otherwise) plays with both musical and societal expectations. He performs on late-night stages and TED conferences in thrift store outfits and has a huge fluffy afro that he bobs around as he performs. He'll begin a sentence speaking in a 'stuffy british gentleman' accent then morph halfway through into a 'stereotypical black guy' accent. In poking fun at pretentious intellectualism, he'll string together such poetic philosophical quasi-absurdisms that you wish he WASN'T "just being funny" in order to give you the go-ahead to actually embrace and dissect the concepts he's satirizing.
It's a masterful kind of play. I'll leave you with this video:
