OK, time a jazz joke (the few & the proud):
It's dawn. The father rooster stands in front of the hen house where he will shortly regale the hens with his best rooster call, and then he'll **** the ones that respond favorably. But this morning is different: the son rooster begs for his big chance: "I tell you, Dad, I been practicing...I got chops & I'll kill if you just give me a chance!."
The father rooster agrees, and then the son rooster launches into a hip, improvisational call...he scats like Satchmo; does a few minutes of straight-up swing in the style of Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Paul Gonzalves; then bebops through the diminished 7th chords of Bird, Diz, and Monk, all blindingly fast; then finishes with a daring modulation based on an theme by Charles Ives. But despite his nearly 10 minutes of virtuosic crowing, not a single hen awakes. The son slinks off in shame.
Then the father rooster winks at his son, thrusts out his chest, and issues a cock-a-doodle-do so primal and soul-stirring as to call forth the spirits of all chickens, past and present. With just a few notes, he sums up the senseless slaughter of many great chickens, the terrible suffering of the species, and the tragedy of the chicken diaspora itself. This brief but powerful call booms off the hills, the mountains, and the sun. The hens, stunned by his call's majesty, fall over twitching in a frenzy of adulation--and the father rooster ****s them all, one by one.
Afterward, the son rooster, despondent, says, "Dad, I sang my guts out, didn't leave a thing in the dressing room--but got nowhere! Then you go out there and knock them on their asses. How do you do it?"
The father rooster nods sagely and replies, "Son--you gotta know the standards."