he reads to us from something called 'Ulysses'.

*And the head coach wants no sissies,
So he reads to us from something called ‘Ulysses’. *

Thanks to Alan Sherman.

But ‘Ulysses’? By James Joyce? Or Homer? And, why would that make boys less- “sissy-like”?

Click on “Censorship”:

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ???

:slight_smile:

I’m thinking the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

FTFY.

Tennyson’s poem is more badass than JJ’s…odd novel;
*It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. *

Alan Sherman probably thought “Ulysses” was a better rhyme for “sissies” than “Homer” or “James Joyce”.

So, their naked ears were tortured, eh?

I always thought the humor was in the boy’s deadpan reporting of things a parent didn’t want to hear their kids away at camp going through (getting lost, poison ivy, etc.) A creepy head coach reading them an obscene novel would seem to fit right in. A decade later, the coach might have read from Hustler.

I see what you did there.

I was told as a kid in the 60s it was James Joyce’s Ulysses. I think most adults at the time took it that way even if there was some other meaning.

Allan Sherman.

His parents divorced when he was very little, he moved around and changed schools a lot, and at one point spent time in a children’s home. He never went to camp, and the story about the coach is probably made up as well, so sub in whatever reading material makes the most sense to you.

This board will not properly auto-parse links which end in punctuation, which will always end up outside the closing tag and render the link virtually useless.

Here:

I forgot about that annoying little feature; I’m surprised no one else knew about it.

NOW you can click on “Censorship”!

I think Spice Weasel and Mr. Kobayashi got it right that it actually refers to Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”.

That kind of earnest Victorian chest-thumping strikes me as much more in line with what a mid-20th-century summer camp head coach would have considered manly and tough than some weird-ass modernist novel. Remember, Sherman’s song came out in 1963.

But the James Joyce Ulysses had been a banned book, and even (especially) people who hadn’t read it just knew it had to be dirty, like Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

That’s just exactly what parents would not want to hear about summer camp.

In the 60s, the Joyce was in the news and well known. The Tennyson was an obscure poem known only to English majors. Further, Joyce had a reputation for being obscene and scandalous. Of course Sherman (whose book The Rape of the A.P.E. is a great discussion of sexual mores of the time) meant Joyce. No one would have gotten the reference to Tennyson.

Agreed.
I was a kid in the 1960s when this came out^, and I knew even then that this line referred to Joyce’s book. It was, as RC says, still in the news.

*There was a Camp Grenada board game (my friend had it). Allan Sherman appear5ed in the commercial, playing it and singing bits from the song.

https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=Ah91i5aZ4r1b9x8R4piyBeebvZx4?p=Camp+Granada+game+commercial&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-703&fp=1

But JJ version had been out of censorship for over 30 years.

The endless British-versus-American-pronunciation business: here in England at any rate, I’m used to the name being pronounced “YOO-li-seez”, as opposed to the American “Yoo-LISS-eez” – stress on different syllables. (Or maybe the way of saying it that I employ is peculiar to my particular circle, not my country as a whole.) At all events, because of this, the couplet in the OP feels to me, forced and “wrong”.

Yes, but it still had a reputation as a notorious book, and, more importantly, it was a short phrase suitable for a quick joke in a novelty song.