Sorry for the late resolution, but here's the story that ties the threads
of the Mystery together.  Remember, it is ONLY a story.

"Merry Pranks"

A man wrote a tune about a merry prankster.  It stuck in another's head
as he was writing about a cafe and a merry widow. A third composer liked
it too, because it reminded him of the merry time his leader and another
had dining on Polish sausage.

These two leaders were such friends one of them decided to pay an extended,
unnounced visit on the other.  The third composer's town didn't have the
right kind of sausage to properly repay the caller's kindness, and told
the visitor that he could not come in.  Almost immediately, sausage-shaped
objects of various sizes were being thrown back and forth.  This made
everyone in the town unhappy and nervous.  The plight of the town became
famous throughout the world, since the third composer wrote a whole batch
of tunes about their problems.

A fourth composer heard about all the attention the town's tunes were
getting, and when he heard the merry prankster tune on the radio he
thought it would be a fun thing to do to play a joke on the third composer
by having the prankster tune barge in on a quiet, much more beautiful
serenade he had just created.

The fourth composers set of tunes became even more famous than the third
composer's.  Eventually, the third composer thought it would be fun to
repay the kindness by making fun of one of the fourth composer's tunes.
He put it in a song called "Humor," in case anyone misunderstood what
he was doing.

Too bad the fourth composer wasn't around to hear the joke, for I'm sure
he would have replied in kind to the series of merry pranks!

Jeff Dunn
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