Best Music Jokes: 100+ Gags For Hits And Gig-gles

Laughter and tears are both responses to everyday life, said Kurt Vonnegut, adding, “I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Music can provide some of life’s most uplifting and spiritual experiences… but there is also plenty to smile about. Let’s hope music jokes are your forte and you can Handel all the wisecracks here, about everything from rock, to classical, jazz, and country music. And don’t fret, we haven’t scaled back… here, in seven different categories, are 100 of the best music jokes and humorous quotes you can find.

And if you feel we’ve missed some of your best music jokes, let us know in the comments.

The Best Music Jokes By Comedians

“Are you going to come along quietly, or do you want musical accompaniment?”
Spike Milligan

“Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there’s no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.”
Jerry Seinfeld

“I wrote a song, but I can’t read music so I don’t know what it is.”
Steven Wright

“I play all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”
Eric Morecambe

“I play all my country and western music backward – your lover returns, your dog comes back and you cease to be an alcoholic.”
Linda Smith

“The first time I sang in the church choir, 200 people changed their religion.”
Fred Allen

“My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the ‘William Tell Overture’ without thinking of The Lone Ranger.”
Billy Connolly

“I love to sing, and I love to drink scotch. Most people would rather hear me drink scotch.”
George Burns

“When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.”
Bob Hope

“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, ‘denigrate’ means ‘put down.’”
Bob Newhart

“If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.”
Johnny Carson

“There’s more evil in the pop charts than an Al Qaida suggestion box.”
Bill Bailey

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
Steve Martin

“My favorite band is called Cockles And Mussels. I saw them alive alive-o in concert.”
Tim Vine

“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
Groucho Marx

“U2’s lawyers work pro Bono.”
Shmuel Breban

“I went to a record store and asked for 50 Cent, they kicked me out for panhandling.”
Jay London

“If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted and musicians denoted.”
George Carlin

“We idolized The Beatles, except for those of us who idolized The Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.”
Dave Barry

The Best Music Jokes By Musicians

“I used to jog but the ice cubes kept falling out of my glass.”
Dave Lee Roth, Van Halen

“Could the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”
John Lennon at The Royal Variety Performance, 1963

“Not seeing my physician for 20 years was one of those phobias that really didn’t pay off.”
Warren Zevon

“I had a boyfriend who told me I’d never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped I’d fail. I said to him, ‘Someday, when we’re not together, you won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the f__king deli without hearing or seeing me.’”
Lady Gaga

“Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”
Frank Zappa

“Australia’s gift to insomniacs… the blonde singing the bland.”
Minnie Riperton

“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”
Louis Armstrong

“I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”
Angus Young, AC/DC

“If I didn’t do music well, I just wouldn’t have anything to do… I can’t cook, and I’d be a terrible housewife.”
Freddie Mercury

“I don’t have a drinking problem, ’cept when I can’t get a drink.”
Tom Waits

“I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall Of Fame Award. But 15 years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it!”
Quincy Jones

“If you wanted to torture me, you’d tie me down and force me to watch our first five videos.”
Jon Bon Jovi

“I don’t perform… seals perform.”
Morrissey

“For Lent, I’ve given up music… there is a God.”
James Blunt

“Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.”
Jelly Roll Morton

“You should have been here last week. Somebody should have been here last week… we had the bouncers chucking them in. A guy rang up to ask what time the show started and we said, ‘What time can you get here?’ The band was playing ‘Tea For One’ and the audience was on its foot. It was two hours before we found out the cashier was dead…”
Ronnie Scott, club owner and saxophonist

“I met her in the museum of paleontology. And I make no bones about it.”
Jarvis Cocker

“Sex has never been an obsession with me. It’s just like eating a bag of crisps. Quite nice, but nothing marvelous.”
Boy George

“In the 60s people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird, people take Prozac to make it normal.”
Damon Albarn

“In the 60s, the record companies seemed to sign anything with long hair; if it was a sheepdog, so what?”
Nick Mason

“If you’re 28 and singing about being over the hill, you’re pretending. When you’re 67 and singing about it, you know what you’re talking about.”
Loudon Wainwright

“We only knew four chords, but we arranged them pretty well.”
Lemmy, on Hawkwind

“Knowing me, I’ll probably get busted at my own funeral.”
Jimi Hendrix

“Life is like a sewer – what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”
Tom Lehrer

“My chances of getting into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame are about as good as Milli Vanilli’s.”
Weird Al Yankovic

“My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.”
Cole Porter

“Let me be clear about this: I don’t have a drug problem; I have a police problem.”
Keith Richards

George Melly to Mick Jagger: “Why is your face was so wrinkled?”
“Laughter lines,” Jagger said to his friend, with a grin.
“Nothing’s that funny,” Melly quipped

The Best Music Jokes By Writers

“A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo – and doesn’t.”
Mark Twain

“Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.”
George Bernard Shaw

“I’m 42. That’s 84 in musician years.”
Monica Wood

“The typewriter, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.”
Oscar Wilde

“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
Noël Coward

The Best Music Jokes In Hollywood

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”
Billy Wilder’s quip about actor Cliff Ormond

“Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?”
John Bender in The Breakfast Club

Elwood: “What kind of music do you usually have here?”
Claire: “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.”
From The Blues Brothers

“The inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm.”
Alfred Hitchcock

“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?”
John Cusack as Rob Gordon in High Fidelity

“I worry that the person who thought up muzak may be thinking up something else.”
Lily Tomlin

The Best Music Jokes About Classical Music

“I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies.”
SJ Perelman

“Brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away.”
English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham

Q: “What’s the difference between a conductor and God?”
A: “God doesn’t think he’s a conductor.”

“Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.”
Gioachino Rossini

“I just can’t listen to any more Wagner… I’m starting to get the urge to conquer Poland.”
Woody Allen

“Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.”
Harold C Schonberg, the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize For Criticism

“Listening to the fifth symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.”
Aaron Copland

Reporter: “What do you think of Beethoven?”
Ringo Starr: “I love him, especially his poems.”
At a press conference on The Beatles’ first US tour in 1964

“The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.”
Swiss composer Arthur Honegger

Q: “Why shouldn’t you let children watch symphonies on TV?”
A: “There’s too much sax and violins.”

Q: “Why couldn’t the string quartet find their composer?”
A: “He was Haydn.”

There are so many jokes about this composer. I could make you a Liszt.

Why did Mozart kill his chickens? Because they always ran around going “Bach! Bach! Bach!”

The Best Music Jokes About Instruments

“I took saxophone lessons for six months until I dislocated my jaw. How was I to know I was supposed to blow in the small end?”
Tommy Cooper

“The piano has been drinking, not me.”
Tom Waits

Q: “What’s an accordion good for?”
A: “Learning how to fold maps.”

Q: “Why do bagpipers walk when they play?”
A: “To get away from the noise.”

Q: “What’s the difference between an oboe and an onion?”
A: “No one cries when you chop up an oboe.”

Q: “How do you fix a broken brass instrument?”
A: “With a tuba glue.”

Q: “What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?”
A: “A flat minor.”

Q: “What does a harmonica and a lawsuit have in common?”
A: “Everyone is relieved when the case is closed.”

Q: “What’s the definition of an optimist?”
A: “A harp player taking out a mortgage.”

“Never look at the trombones; you’ll only encourage them.”
Richard Strauss

“[The piano] is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Q: “Why is a piano so hard to open?”
A: “Because the keys are on the inside.”

“Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”
Oscar Wilde in 1882, reporting a sign in a saloon bar in America

“I got to try the bagpipes. It was like trying to blow an octopus.”
James Galway

“An oboe is an ill wind that nobody blows good.”
Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House

“[A clarinet is] an instrument of torture operated by someone with cotton wool in their ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“I do not have a single white note on my piano; my elephant smoked too much.”
Victor Borge

“I was playing piano. Someone shouted: ‘Get him off!’ The manager shouted: ‘No, he’s ’armless!’ I heard somebody say: ‘That’s what he ought to be.’”
Les Dawson

What did the robbers take from the music store? The lute.

Why did the pianist keep banging his head against the keys? He was playing by ear.

Best Music Jokes: Miscellaneous

“I went to a karaoke bar last night that didn’t play any 70s music. At first, I was afraid. Oh, I was petrified.”
Stewart Francis

“Playing bop is like Scrabble with all the vowels missing.”
Duke Ellington

“If you’re in jazz and more than 10 people like you, you’re labeled commercial.”
Herbie Mann

“Soft rock music isn’t rock, and it ain’t music. It’s just soft.”
George Carlin

“I know only two tunes: one of them is ‘Yankee Doodle’, and the other isn’t.”
Ulysses S Grant, former US President

Lady: “About how much money do you boys average a street?”
Oliver Hardy: “I would say about 50 cents a street.”
Woman: “There’s a dollar. Move down a couple of streets.”
When Laurel and Hardy play street musicians in Below Zero

Q: “How do you make a bandstand?”
A: “Take away their chairs.”

Q: “What kind of music are balloons afraid of?”
A: “Pop music”.

“I knew Ice Cube when he was called Water.”

Q: “What’s the first sign of Madness?”
A: “Seeing Suggs walking up your driveway.”

“Knock, knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“A little old lady.”
“A little old lady who?”
“I didn’t know you could yodel.”

Q: “What rock band has four guys that don’t sing?”
A: “Mount Rushmore.”

Q: “What kind of band doesn’t play music?”
A: “A rubber band.”

“I went to see an Elvis impersonator, but I got there too late… he had left the building.”

How many indie hipsters does it take to change a light bulb? It’s an obscure number, you probably haven’t heard it.

What do you call a cow that can play a musical instrument? A moo-sician.

What makes pirates such good singers? They can hit the high Cs.

Why did the singer climb a ladder? She wanted to reach the high notes!

Middle C, E flat and G walk into a bar. “Sorry,” the barman said. “We don’t serve minors.”

My girlfriend left me because of my obsession with Linkin Park. But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

A musician told me he was going to hit me with the neck of his guitar. I replied, “Is that a fret?

Me and my friends are in a band called “Duvet.” We’re a cover band.

What part of a turkey is musical? The drumstick.

Why couldn’t the athlete listen to her music? Because she broke the record.

What types of songs do planets sing? Nep-tunes.

What did Jay-Z call his wife before they were married? Feyoncé

What is the difference between a fish and a piano? You can’t tuna fish.