Practical Jokes
Apart from his impressive playing style, Joe Venuti was almost as well known for his amusing practical jokes. He was well known to play inexpensive violins, since many of his former band members have said that he had been known to crack these over the heads of his players on occasion. There are many anecdotes of his humorous pranks fondly told by his associates. One of the best known tales was one in which he filled a tuba player’s horn with flour during a break in a rehearsal. Another involved sending a well-known one-armed trumpet player, Wingy Manone, a single cufflink for Christmas several years in a row. He was also well known for calling up every bass player in the New York phonebook and asking them to meet with him on a street corner. When over 50 bass players arrived with their instruments it created a minor roadblock. He then subsequently had to pay the players for their time as mandated by the AMF.
Read more about this topic: Joe Venuti
Famous quotes containing the words practical and/or jokes:
“The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that there are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)