Kazoo Day

What the day is

Kazoo Day is observed on January 28. The kazoo is the one instrument almost everybody plays wrong on the first attempt.

Origin and background

Blowing into a kazoo produces nothing. It is not a wind instrument in the ordinary sense, because it has no reed and no air column to set vibrating. It is a mirliton: a device that takes a sound you are already making and alters its timbre. The player hums, the voice vibrates the air in the tube, and that vibration shakes a thin membrane stretched over a hole in the top, which adds the buzzing rasp. Stop humming and the instrument is silent, whatever you do with your breath.

The membrane was traditionally a slice of spider egg sac or thin gut, and is now usually plastic. It is also the part that fails, going slack or damp and leaving the kazoo dull.

Mirlitons are old and widespread. African instruments using a vibrating membrane to color the voice long predate the American kazoo, and comparable devices appear across several continents, often in ritual use where disguising the human voice is the point rather than a side effect.

The American version is generally credited to Alabama Vest, a Black inventor in Macon, Georgia, in the nineteenth century, working with a clockmaker named Thaddeus von Clegg who built it. The documentation for this account is thin and the story is repeated far more confidently than the evidence supports, which is worth saying. The metal kazoo manufactured in Eden, New York from 1916 is better attested, and the factory still operates.

How to take part

• Hum, do not blow. That is the whole technique.
• Try saying doo or who into it rather than humming a flat note, which articulates the sound.
• Replace a slack membrane, which restores a dead kazoo instantly.
• Hand them out and attempt a tune collectively, which is the traditional use.
• Listen to a mirliton in a non-western tradition and hear the same principle used seriously.