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Pianos keep falling on my head.
That doesn’t mean that I will soon be squashed flat, dead
With a piano on my head!
Those pianos keep falling on my head, they keep falling
Nothing’s worrying me
’Cause I might get on TV ...
Poor Botch Casually! Poor Some Dunce Kid! Poor movie, for that matter.
Now you’d better enjoy that little bit of gratuitousness while you can, it’s all the cruelty you are going to get for this entire essay because, as my rather limited research has shown, no one... no one in the entire history of the defenestration or other plummeting related activity involving pianos, from the days of Bartolomeo Cristofori down to the present, no one has ever been squashed by one1.
And yet... and yet there is a strong tradition, mainly in animation, but in other media too, of depicting this (as I say historically unheard of) event.
For example there was (possibly still is, I don’t watch much telly) a TV advertisement for a certain sort of garbage bag wherein two guys are hoisting a piano up the outside of a building (presumably to anti-defenestrate it later) when the rope breaks and the piano falls. Unperturbed the guys grab one of these bags and hold it out like firemen to catch the plummeting piano. Of course it misses them and crashes impressively into smithereens, and we all know that if they hadn’t missed it it would have certainly destroyed the bag (which is not a good advertisement) and probably rendered my assertion of no one ever being killed by falling pianos somewhat less accurate. But they then happily scoop up the pieces into their bag and haul that up, this time on the inside of the building. “Where would you like your piano?” one of them asks the soon-to-become-distraught owner. Why this would make anyone happy, joyful or gleeful ( I can’t think of the right word) to buy garbage bags I don’t know, but it does demonstrate my point.
Then there was a TV programme called (if I remember) Dead Like Me. In this a young girl is hit by a toilet seat from a de-orbiting space station, I suppose it was a toilet seat because they obviously couldn’t have a piano up there in the vacuum of space since no one could hear it. She then becomes a grim reaper (Death, as with so many successful and ubiquitous organisations, seems here to be a franchise). To make up for the toilet seat her first client is naturally killed by a descending piano.
Then again on the BBC programme Top Gear apparently every time a particular car (I believe it’s a Morris Marina) shows up a piano is dropped on it---even when they had already tied a piano to the roof of one! This is apparently true!
I’m sure I hardly need to itemise the vast list of incidents depicted in animated cartoons; from the obvious candidate of the much-killed Kenny, through Road Runner to Bugs Bunny: except maybe to mention that, as an important plot device in the mixed live-action and animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the partner of glum gumshoe Eddie Valiant (both of whom are live-action humans) has, previous to the beginning of the movie, been killed by having a cartoon piano dropped on his head by the movie’s villain. Weird! I suppose you had to be there to see how that worked: and we weren’t!
Now why, why (one asks) is there all this mere depiction of the traumatic interaction of pianos and gravity and (often) heads when there is so little reality to suggest it? Is there some deep seated Freudian fear of being forced to learn the piano by your mother? Or is it instead a Jungian Archetype from our distant past of an accident involving a cave door. I’m sure we will never know.
Finally I should admit to a liberty I have taken. You see, none of the pianos in my examples have actually been pushed out of windows: there has, indeed, been no defenestration described here at all. All pianos mentioned have either fallen from the sides of buildings or from NSPOs (that’s Non-Specific Points of Origin). However, trumping any fact of mere reality, is the shear joyous beauty of the word ‘defenestration’ that compels me into truth-bending. I mean, who could forget the Defenestration of Prague ? Even if it hadn’t been on the lead-up to the Thirty-Years War : even if the defenestrated victims hadn’t survived their drop from the third floor castle window, either (as their fellow Catholics asserted) by the benevolent intervention of angels or, as Protestant commentators commentated, by their landing on (or more likely in) a dry moat filled with horse manure: we would still remember it simply for its name,
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
Defenestration keeps floating through my brain
That doesn’t mean that I will tend to be a pain.
About defenestration in my brain
That defenestration keeps floating through my brain
It keeps floating...
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Notes:
1 However there is this somewhat unbelievable report of a whole series of them.
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