WARNING: This is purely a light-hearted, fun-way-to-waste-time kind of article. If you have anything urgent to do, do it. This is not urgent. But it might be funny.
The fact that the American Symphony Orchestra, under Leon Botstein, just played English composer Robert Simpson's little-known but explosive piece Volcano led us, in an utterly silly moment, to reflect that Robert Simpson has the same surname as this chap.
Which, in turn, led us to idly speculate on what other classical composers share surnames with comedians (yes, thank you, we are aware that Homer Simpson is not a real comedian, but the purposes of this purposeless discussion...).
This is who we came up with. Enjoy the clips.
Hey, feel free to follow-up with some of your own. You know you're going to anyway.
James Brooks, an English composer and violinist even less well-known today than Simpson, but he played for Handel in the 1780's, and this comedic legend.
This one's my favorite. The great Ralph Vaughan Williams and his motormouth namesake.
We're sure the Australian composer Alfred Hill (1869-1960) could not have been more different than this gentleman.
Are we allowed to cheat slightly? If we slightly shorted the surname of the estimable film composer Debbie Wiseman to...gently does it...there we go...one of the comedic greats.
American composer Douglas Moore is not spoken about that often these days, a shame because he wrote some fine music, but his comedic incarnation (as it were) is still very well known, indeed.
As a postscript, we've heard that Bill Cosby has composed some jazz numbers.
Come to think of it, doesn't Steve Martin compose some of his own material for the harmonica. Or is it the banjo?
If either of those are true, then we have very neat examples of comedians and composers with the same surname who also happen to be the same person. See? The possibilities with this game are endless...
