The Cereal List / Mother-approved!

Euphonium players, your stress-related acne will soon clear up. Bassoonists, now’s the time to straighten those curls. Tuba players, you no longer need be ashamed of your rashes! You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief because the contra-alto clarinet took top honors at last weekend’s “Least Sexy Instrument” competition.

“It was a tough choice,” said Gary Beavers, a world renowned ophicleidist who served on the jury. “Some argued that kissing a brass player, with lips that taste like coins, was far more disgusting than kissing a reed player, but we have to judge based on the instruments, not the instrumentalists.”

“The bassoon and euphonium have many undesirable qualities,” said another jury member known as Rusty Trombone, “but in the end we felt the contra-alto clarinet was the most maladroit and awkward of the finalists.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s only sexy if it’s versatile.”

As a “prize” for winning, players of the contra-alto clarinet can claim a gift certificate for Amazon.com (good for one month) which will allow them to turn in their instruments and learn to play the cello.

According to a forthcoming report from Claudette Hodges of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, the only musical instrument that facilitates all of the stages of Freud’s Psychosexual Development is the Holton TR395 Superbone, which functions as both a valve- and a slide-trombone.

Here are some highlights from the forthcoming report:

The Oral Stage:
Some trombonists enjoy secretly emptying their spit-valves directly into their own mouths.

The Anal Stage:
This one seems like a stretch to us (ahem), but according to Claudette, some trombonists deliberately allow rust to form on their mouthpieces and enjoy the sensation of the rust on their lips.  She connects this to the fascination with one’s own waste and with the exploratory notion of ingesting one’s own fecal matter

The Phallic Stage:
This involves the trombonist fully exploring his or her slide, stretching to achieve the longest distance possible, and experimenting with fast and slow hand movements to achieve maximum satisfaction.

The Genital Stage is what makes the Superbone the ideal instrument for psychosexual development.  Superbonists derive special pleasure from the dualism of their instruments’ mechanical parts, and this flexibility results in a healthy openness to a wide variety of sexual experiences.  Freud would have argued that this leads to healthy heterosexual behavior, but Claudette prefers the 21st-century notions of pansexuality and hermaphroditism.  Operating both the valves and a slide, the instrumentalist uses a variety of fingering techniques and “positions” to achieve his or her full potential.