Scoring the quotidian sacred: How music makes us laugh and cry in Bluey

By seamlessly blending comedy and music, Bluey (2018–present) effectively captures the emotional journey of parenting and reflects a broader Australian cultural focus on the local and mundane. In this article, I explore how humour contributes to the emotional impact of Bluey in combination with western classical music. The influence of Romanticism on the perception of classical music as transcendent contrasts with the everyday nature of Bluey’ s narratives and setting, resulting in moments of humour. This humour is ironic, as each element of the joke carries a sense of the other. This article draws on netnographic data as well as previous scholarship to explore how classical music operates within Bluey as a text in the broadest sense and how it can be situated within the history of Australian creative writing. Bluey is not just a phenomenally successful children’s programme; it is a phenomenally successful Australian children’s programme, and this aspect forms a significant part of its identity. This article, therefore, takes a moment to consider the programme’s place within the broader context of Australian cultural production. In doing so, I explore the concept of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘quotidian sacred’ to delve into how music supports both the creation of humour in Bluey , its emotional intensity and its Australian cultural specificity. Drawing on Lyn McCredden and Ashcroft et al.’s research on the contemporary sacred in Australia, which highlights a uniquely Australian expression of the sacred as ‘earthed, embodied, humbled, local, demotic, ordinary, and proximate’, this article examines this concept as a lens through which Bluey’s portrayal of the child can be understood. By bringing together the elements of the Australian sublime, the Australian sacred, humour and sound, I argue that the juxtaposition of the transcendent and the ordinary creates Bluey ’s emotional impact at the shared border between each element.