Emerging Jokes about the pedal steel.

[Barry Yasika]

“I’ve started hearing more jokes about the banjo and the steel guitar. The banjo gets stuck with the hillbilly schtick, the steel guitar with the weepy cliché. But those jokes add insult to injury, because both instruments once defined the sound of American music, and now they’ve been pushed aside, evicted from the very traditions they helped create. To laugh at them is to forget the history, craft, and emotion they still carry.”

This kind of mockery really gets my goat!! I've spent and spend so much time tryng to refine something I see as beautiful only to be slapped in the face with veiled cliches referring it to the move "Deliverance"

[Bill Ford]

Prime example of missing steel, fiddle....I watched CMA awards for about 2 minutes,
thinking I was going to maybe see/hear country music,
big mistake, then realized why I no longer turn a radio on expecting to hear "real country"
staying with my old cd collection of real country and Green, Emmons, Franklyn, Byrd...Vince, George, ET, Allen J, well, you get it.
Banjer..deliverance, steel guitar...whiney thingy....etc, etc

[Bill McCloskey]

Jokes about instruments are not limited to banjos (one of our SGF founder's favorite topics) and steels.

Jokes about violas in classical circles are legendary :
"How can you tell if a viola player is playing out of tune? The bow is moving."
"What is the only thing a violinist can do better than a viola player? Play the viola."
"What's the difference between a viola player and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four."

[William Seeders Mosheim]

I'm a banjo maker by trade and play steel and banjo both professionally...I've heard all the jokes and continue to. I enjoy hearing new ones but I get awfully tired of the Deliverance jokes in particular. Luckily, that movie is no longer a mainstay in popular culture so it's becoming less frequent. Banjo and steel are becoming hip again in a lot of circles so they're on their way back up in the ranks and starting to be taken very seriously again. Even some huge pop stars are featuring banjos and pedal steel in recordings and on stage with them these days so the tides are turning, as slow as that may be...

There's jokes about every instrument and it's players. It can be incredibly obnoxious at times but try and take it for the lighthearted nature it usually is as a good laugh is always healthy. Most of the time I've found the people telling them aren't musicians and they think it's a fun way to relate or take someone down a peg they're envious of as they can't play music. I agree that there's a line though and some people cross that line with a smile on their face...

Barry, on another note, I see your Bethlehem Steel profile photo and it brings a smile to my face. My great-grandfather was a riveter for Bethlehem Steel and I hold that history very proudly as he helped build some of this countries most impressive bridges. I also have a friend who's currently reviving parts of the original factory and restoring and putting to work old power hammers that haven't been used in a generation or more. What a legacy that company had!

[Bill McCloskey]

Speaking of Bethlehem Steel: my grandfather was the VP of Edgewater Steel in Pittsburgh. I grew up in a steel town.

[Nico Hillary]

I dunno, I've been taking the rise out drummers for so long (What's got three legs and one a**hole?
A drum stool! etc.) I guess it's kind of our turn...

[Greg Forsyth]

Some jokes make me wonder where they are emerging from

[Robert Miller]

I don't take it personally. I have a feeling a lot of them start with players themselves. Unless you play a lot of temp/humidity controlled environments (Studios aren't generally even that stable) you're gonna have some oh @#$?! moments that sound like an SNL skit sooner or later. Nothing to do but fix it and laugh.
Of course, I might be letting myself off the hook for mercilessly taunting bass players after bring equipment in to a club out of a trailer that's legit -15F or colder. Necks don't warm up as quick as strings do...

...I'm a bad people

[Brooks Montgomery]

What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin?

You don’t spill beer on a violin.

[Nico Hillary]

Now stop me if you've heard this one...

What's the difference between an onion and a banjo?
Nobody ever cried when a banjo got cut in half.

Thank you, thank you. You've been a lovely audience. G'night!

[Don R Brown]

Such jokes are not unique to music, I'm a "car guy" and certain styles of Corvettes are occasionally made fun of. My reply is "Make all the jokes you want, I'll even tell a few myself. Just don't try to take mine away from me!" A similar reply might be worth having available if the digs bother you.

[Bobby Hearn]

How do you get a steel player to play out of tune? Hire him for a gig!

[Bill McCloskey]

Here is one I heard from David Grisman:

I stopped at a 7/11 to pick up some coffee after a gig and stupidly left my Gibson Granada Banjo in the back seat with the windows down. When I came back...you guessed it...

There were two banjos in the back seat.

[Bruce Coffman]

Oh please oh please oh please — let’s do drummers! I’ve got LOADS of those and they’re all both funny and painfully accurate.

[Per Berner]

OK, here you go: What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer!

[Nico Hillary]

How can you tell there's a drummer at your front door?
The knock speeds up and he has no clue when to come in.

[Bud Angelotti]

I once went to a gig and started to set up the steel. The manager of the establishment wanted to know why I was setting up the cheese slicer on stage. The kitchen manager wanted to slice eggs. One of the cooks tried to grab some of the cheese. I told him thats nacho cheese.

[Dennis Montgomery]

Alright...here's some more...

Q: What do you a call a drummer without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless

Q: How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but he'll smash 10 bulbs before he realizes they don't just push into the socket

Q: How can you tell the stage is level?
A: The drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth

And my favorite guitarist joke - though it doesn't really apply to pedal steel players as we're generally nicer to each other

Q: How many electric guitarists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 10. One to change the bulb and the other nine to stand around and say, "I could do that better than him"

[Bill McCloskey]

Times like this I really miss b0b.

[John Drury]

Oh please oh please oh please — let’s do drummers! I’ve got LOADS of those and they’re all both funny and painfully accurate.

So this drummer can't hold down a gig, constantly getting canned due to his inability to keep in time,
Gets very depressed about the rejection, decides to end his life!
Goes down to the tracks and throws himself behind a train.

[Dave Grafe]

Every instrument has been the butt of countless jokes since instruments have been a thing, it's not at all personal. For instance;

"Q: What's the difference between a cello and a coffin?
A: The coffin has the corpse on the inside."

"Q: Why do drummers leave their sticks on the dashboard?
A: So they can park in handicap zones."

"Q: Why are violins smaller than violas?
A: They're not, it's an optical illusion because the violinists heads are so much bigger."

...and we all know how to "get the guitar player to turn down" and what to do when "the bass player locked the keys in the car and can't get out." The jokes about keyboard players and their cats alone could fill multiple pages here.

I have worked with military bands and orchestras where this sort of talk went on all day long. If they're telling jokes about you it's up to you to come back with a good joke about their instrument of choice. This is called "community!"

[Bruce Coffman]

So the drummer walks into a store and strides up to the counter. The young woman behind the counter asks "What can I do for you today?"

The drummer replies: "Lemme see – I need three sets of Ernie Ball Extra Slinky guitar strings, two 20' 1/4" to 1/4" instrument cables, a 25' XLR mic cable, a set of RotoSound strings for a 5-string bass, a Remo WeatherKing snare top head, and six sets of Zildjian 5B drumsticks, please. Oh – and some Fender medium guitar picks."

The woman says: "Say, you must be a drummer!" The drummer, puffing up his chest and standing a little bit straighter replies, "Why yes, as a matter of fact I am! How could you tell?"

The woman looks him square in the eyes and says "Because this is a pet store, sweetie – the music store is two doors down."

[J D Sauser]

A joke which I stole for the Harp community:

"PSG Players, spend half the time tuning that thing, the other half playing out of tune".
I think that sums it all up.


Here are some I use to annoy some unsuspecting PSG players with:

“Look at this guy on pedal steel—more levers than a Vegas slot machine and just as confused about the lack of a payout.”

“You ever watch a pedal steel player setup? It’s like NASA prepping a launch, except the rocket never seems to want to go "Boom!".”

“My friend, that contraption’s got so many things wrong with it, do you even have the appropriate licenses to carry that thing?.”

“Pedal steel players are the only musicians who need a toolbox, a roadmap, and emotional support just to tune.”

“I asked him what key he was in—he tugged on a dozen levers, pressed three pedals, and said, ‘I’ll get back to you 'bout that tomorrow!.’”

“Oh, so you play pedal steel - what, regular guitars weren’t complicated enough to keep you busy in your mid-life crisis?.”

“Look at him: all those pedals and levers. Buddy, if you spent half that effort on social skills, you’d have friends.”

“Pedal steel players are the only musicians who show up with an instrument that needs an instruction manual and a therapist.”

“I asked him to play something simple and he proceeded to stare at the floor floor pedals like I had asked him to defuse a bomb.”

At somebody introduced to me as a "Pro.": “Oh, you're a Pedal Steel Player? Well, good for you!, But what do you do for work?’”

He told me he practices every night: "Yeah, I’d hide in a room too if I played that thing.”

And don't get me started on "G-strings" even if they're a bit sharp!... this is a family oriented forum.

I also had an unsuspecting PSG player explaining to me that the instrument was NOT the "keyboard thing" I suggested he was playing. I asked him a bunch of ridiculous questions, like if the pedals were to make him play faster and why he didn't use both feet and so forth, it went for a solid 10 minutes, calling it "Some kind of keyboard" to the point he seemed worn out and in serious doubt that he could ever convince me that it was some sort of "guitar"... at the end I asked pointing at the 3 pedals to his left:
"so then, thats an Emmons or Day setup?" he almost threw that D10 at me... "YOU Sun'afa..."
After I told him I was on the Forum, and my name, he told me he didn't like me much more "over there either"

The last one, which I threw at a guy annoying me with yet another out of tune version of BE's "A Way To Survive" insisting he was one day going to play exactly like "Buddy", almost got me into a fight with him:

"Do me a favor and go over there and walk over to that corner. OK... now do it again, but this time LIKE BUDDY EMMONS!" ('nuff said! SOMEHOW, he didn't see the humor in that. )


Humor is as debatable as musical styles and taste... J-D.