An Australian Aboriginal musical wind instrument of long tubular shape.
In college the word “didgeridoo” was a source of humor for us, not out of ridicule for the instrument but just because the word itself sounded funny. I would punch and howl the last syllable, lingering for several seconds on the doooooo after racing through the word on a decrescendo. We used the word when we could not remember the words to songs or when anything else slipped our minds, filling in mental lapses with some good old didgeridoo. We had a didgeridoo in the dormitory, but to me its low, booming sound is less memorable than our treatment of the instrument’s name. I associated the didgeridoo with the sackbut, though the two instruments share no heritage. The sackbut (another word which provoked post-adolescent titters for its evocation of sack-shaped buttocks) is an early version of today’s trombone. I only associate the sackbut with the didgeridoo because I learned of the two instruments’ existences at about the same time. The sackbut I associated with Garrison Keillor, who once wrote that every sackbut player he’d ever known thought the world owed them a goddam living. The humor was prescient at the time, as it intersected with my exposure to an “original instruments” movement that threatened to change music and all else, this high ambition a reflection of the movement’s self-importance. The sackbut joke soured, though, as I found the humorlessness in Keillor’s humor. I think of Keillor as the Edward Hopper of American literature. Hopper, critics, say, had no sympathy for the subjects of his paintings, some suggesting that his ambivalence even reached repugnancy for those blank, cardboard-faced characters. Garrison Keillor has a similar attitude, and I find that his humor is absorbed by the sneering disdain he heaps on his characters.
