Why do we laugh at music?

Why do we laugh at music? Maybe it's just me. It's not because it's funny. Have you ever been on a roller coaster laughing the whole time? Sometimes I laugh at music like that. When it is so good that I am amazed that I am hearing it, I laugh. Sometimes it's a chuckle, sometimes it's hysterical.

I saw a show recently that made me laugh. It was the band Them Crooked Vultures. It is a group made up of people from different bands, all of which I worship. Queens of the Stone Age, Led Zeppelin and Nirvana. As the show started, it was every bit as good as I hoped it would be. The music was energetic, loud and well written. Nobody in the crowd had ever heard the music before since they had not yet released any of it yet. Josh Homme, the front man, even mentioned that he was having a great time playing music for people that they had never heard before. I laughed through the first two songs while jumping up and down, because I new I was in for a treat. By the third song, I just watched with my jaw on the floor as they continued to go above and beyond my expectations.

An interesting side note. I saw a DVD of Radiohead one time where the crowd that they were playing to had not heard the music before. When the band would play a song from an older album, they would cheer loudly before and after the song. There was little response to the songs that they played that were from the album that they hadn't released yet, since no one had heard it before. When they released that album, it ended up being the album that cemented their place as a musical powerhouse. I bet if you went to a Radiohead show today, the crowd would cheer more for the songs of that album more than their previously released stuff.