ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the kinds of material manipulation that have most often been heard as humorous: repetition, contrast, motivic amplification, and the special treatment of returns and endings. It discusses some speculation about the nature of the comic spirit in Joseph Haydn's compositional ethos. Haydn thus makes a conventional repetition into a comic event, and he creates the irony of a slapdash presentation of a harmony turning out to be the very thing demanded by convention. Return and closure in fact permeate Haydn's musical language at all levels, from the local rhetoric of paired phrases to the global ethos of the development and renewal of thematic material. Haydn's humorous ploys at these junctures are legion, and the best-known include cases where a beginning has all the characteristics of an ending or where the ending and the beginning turn out to be identical.
