I once read a report about an international conference on humor, held -- are you waiting -- in Belfast. One of the papers was about light bulb jokes, or more broadly, why are certain groups singled out for mockery. The thesis of the paper was that the jokes tended to be about people on the very edge of one's linguistic group, and/or if those people were in-migrants to an urban culture and took jobs at the bottom of the scale. This explained why Parisians told jokes about Belgians, Londoners about Irishmen, and so on. Counter-jokes also played on this theme, e.g. How many Parisians (fill in your elite group here) does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two, one to mix the martinis, and one to call the electrician. I don't know what this has to do about musicians, but I thought this thread needed some bracing academic input. Are viola players assumed to be stupid because they play stuff that no one notices in the middle of the important stufff played by the elite violins, etc? I leave banjo players alone. Yours, Peter