YMMV / Spike Jones

• He Really Can Act: Though their comedy music far overshadows their work today, Spike Jones and his band were fully capable of playing music straight in other genres when they wanted to. Examples for the curious include Jazz ("John Scotter Trot", "When Buddha Smiles", "Love for Sale"), Blues ("Fort Worth Jail", "Moanin' Low"), and Big Band/Swing ("Whittle Out a Whistle", "Mary Lou", "Casey Jones").
  • He even started a second group, Spike Jones and His Other Orchestra, just to showcase their non-comedy work, but the public wasn't interested.
  • This also applies to Spike's comedic work; while a casual listener might think that a Spike Jones travesty was a cacophony of random noise, much time was spent behind the scenes choosing what nonsense would be the best fit aurally.
    "One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful."
    — Spike Jones Jr.
• Parody Displacement: Many of Spike's songs fall under this trope, as much of the humor in his "travesties" were from making fun of popular songs of the day. Today, the originals he spoofed are mostly forgotten; many people discovering Spike Jones for the first time won't even know that songs like "Der Fuehrer's Face", "Hey, Mabel" or "I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia" aren't his originals.