I’ve not heard much of his music (I must remedy that), but I remember hearing one of his pieces (perhaps on Prairie Home Companion?) which was an operatic setti

I’ve not heard much of his music (I must remedy that), but I remember hearing one of his pieces (perhaps on Prairie Home Companion?) which was an operatic setting of a joke (“transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises”) and it elucidated so much of how opera worked structurally that I never got from listening to actual operas. There’s a lot of education hidden in the jokes.