Is the Campari Martini the Funniest Cocktail Ever?
A strange, bittersweet, hilariously deadpan riff on the Martini. Also, Norm MacDonald?
This week’s drink is a Campari Martini. It’s just what it sounds like, and it’s both hilarious and, somehow, absurdly delicious.
When I say this drink is funny I mean it frequently causes me to literally LOL. Like an actual cackle of glee at the drink’s name, recipe, presentation, and taste.
Why do I think this drink is funny? Well, the easiest way to explain it is to go back to when I was in high school.
As a teenager, playing music was a big part of my life. Yes, I was a band nerd. I played tuba, but also guitar, bass, and a bit of flute, baritone, and piano (very badly).
So when the opportunity presented itself, I took AP music theory.
What I learned most from that class was not the theory itself — please do not ask me to identify or explain the Mixolydian mode — but how truly accomplished musicians think about music. The folks who play music for a living, whose brains are deeply marinated in practical and conceptual musical knowledge, think about music in a way that is cultural, contextual, and historical. It’s a technical exercise, but also a lively and expressive one, all at the same time.
Music is a language. And like any other language, my AP music theory teacher explained, you can use it to tell jokes. He said that while he was in college, he and his music buddies would look at old scores and find them funny. He realized that the composers were winking, smirking, raising their eyebrows, nudge-nudging each other in their compositions. They were telling jokes with their notes.
I remember, as a 17 year old, being fairly confused by this concept. How could music — and especially music-on-the-page, just the notations — be funny?
But if you think about it, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Comedy is the art of subverting expectations. You are primed to think one thing is going to happen, and then something else, something opposite, happens. That’s funny! And in music, there are inevitably a lot of expectations that can be twisted and subverted and reversed and undermined. The more familiar you are with the music that a composer is commenting on, the more jokes you’ll notice.
The presence of twists and reversals of expectations mean that, at least for those in the know, music can be funny.
Alternatively, you can be primed to think that there will be a twist, a cunning reversal, but then there isn’t — that’s funny too!
Norm MacDonald, the greatest comedian of my lifetime, once said that the perfect joke is one in which the setup and the punchline are the same.
Both of these concepts capture my thinking about this week’s drink, the Campari Martini.
On the one hand, it’s very much a subversion of the expectations one sets when calling a drink a Martini.
One the other hand, it’s a gag cocktail in which the setup and the punchline are exactly the same.
It’s just a Martini…but, uh, made with Campari. LOL. ROTFL! LMAO. And so on.
Naturally, you can make this with Cynar too. Even better, you can make this with a blend of Amari, based on whatever you bittersweet bottles you happen to have around.
A House Amari Blend Martini isn’t quite as naturally funny — but it is pretty tasty. So we will make one of those too.
The One Ingredient Cocktail?
For the longest time, I have argued that a vodka Martini that contains no vermouth1 is not really a cocktail. It’s just vodka, stirred over ice. If that’s what you like, go with dog, but cold vodka is not a cocktail. Cocktails require at least two ingredients.
I stand by that assessment. But the Campari Martini does not operate under the normal rules and regulations. It operates under a deadpan joke version of cocktail rules in which, if vodka stirred over ice is a cocktail, then Campari stirred over ice is also a cocktail.
Okay, okay, there is a second ingredient, and it’s an important one, since it gives the mix some of its…Martini-ness. The drink doesn’t really taste right without it.