Exactly. The idea of reading Homer is far less shocking than reading porn, and therefore the camper’s parents in the song and the audience listening to the song is going to react more strongly.
There is no distinction - claiming there are alligators in the lake or ptomaine in the kitchen is going to lead to consequences at least as severe for everybody.
The point of the song is to be funny, and it does so thru humorous exaggeration and rhymes. Reading from Homer isn’t exaggerated enough to be funny - reading from Joyce is.
The notion that a parent would react with horror to claims that they are reading Joyce but dismiss concerns about ptomaine as fantasy falls a little short of believable. Like from here to Albany short.
Fun data point: Allan Sherman’s 1965 album *My Name Is Allan *bears the credit “Arranged and Conducted by Ralph Carmichael, With the James Joyce Singers.”
Ummm, BECAUSE HE’S A LITTLE KID, a species of mammal famous for gratifying its spur-of-the-moment impulses, as opposed to thinking about consequences!
Because, as I explained at some length above, the kid’s writing a letter home because the counselor made it a condition of going out to play. And his first day was so underwhelming, he’d rather piss, moan, gripe, and try to manipulate his folks into pulling him out.
Until he hears happy sounds outside, coming from all the kids who already finished writing their letters. Rather than take the time to rewrite, he adds the disclaimer and submits it, then goes out to play.
Because he’s a kid who doesn’t think about consequences.
I remember this song; when I was a kid we had this on a 45, with the sequel on the B side. Here’s a link to the lyrics of both: Camp Granada Song lyrics midi 2024
Predictably, the sequel isn’t as clever as the original, though a few stanzas have stuck in my mind over the decades, which is how I managed to find the lyrics.
I don’t remember the couplet in question; I imagine I didn’t understand it at the time and simply forgot it. So, with no dog in the fight and no preconceptions, I’m utterly convinced by those who think it’s a reference to Joyce. Why? It’s funny. With the non-Joyce interpretation, it’s the first couplet that isn’t at all funny.
Here’s how I see it. First, a lot of us are overthinking it. It’s a JOKE, a novelty song. There may be constructional inconsistencies. Who cares? It’s not serious literature.
The song is aimed at parents, and their reaction to the letter as it unfolds, engaging empathy (a very useful tool in the humorist’s kit). Each couplet begins with something mild and normal and ends with something that makes it horrifying. As mentioned above, each couplet increases the horror.
But at the end, “things look better,” which is the punch line in the long joke. Now, we can interpret this different ways, but the most sensible is that the kid is either exaggerating or making stuff up. The fact that he’d be unlikely to be able to make up the Joyce reference is a minor structural weakness. That’s all there is to it. I agree with DChord’s arguments that it’s a weakness. But to reinterpret it to fix this weakness causes a bigger weakness, which is an unfunny couplet and a serious stumble in the build-up.
Well, I remember reading a kid’s translation of “The Oddysey” where the hero was “Ulysses”. It wasn’t even in verse form; it was for middle-school kids. In any case, I don’t expect an author of a funny song to need to be this precise. So, I don’t buy this argument for the Joyce hypothesis.
Bingo … but of course, bonus points if kids like it too. They just don’t have to get every reference.
Right – it makes sense if we take all but the ending of the song as primarily factual, and not so much if it’s a contrived fiction to achieve a purpose. So, good point, but I call it a minor (and very forgivable) weakness, not a refutation of the Joyce hypothesis. When we get to the end, we’re just supposed to laugh. There are two interpretations: 1) that it’s artifice that’s no longer necessary, and 2) that now that things are looking up, the kid no longer cares about these issues. Withing the bounds of a simple joke tune, I don’t think it’s even necessary to decide between these two options. Instead, have fun with the ambiguity. As a songwriter, I like to present ambiguity of this kind. But true, it’s ambiguity with minor flaws for either interpretation. Those logical flaws do go away if we reject the Joyce hypothesis, but then the line just isn’t funny (so why do people laugh?)
Bingo.
Thanks!
Except, the um, HUMOR part. But that’s unimportant, in a serious work like this.
It’s ALLAN
Unless, of course, the purpose of the song is humor. In that case, Joyce is absolutely necessary.
People keep saying he started with one word and tried to find a rhyme for that. In general, that’s rarely how songwriting works: the search is for a PAIR of words that rhyme and achieve the purpose. Sure, sometimes you have one for sure and search for a rhyme, and don’t find a good one, so you try another. In this case, Sherman had to find (a) a scandalous book and (b) any word rhyming with it that could end the couplet and put it in context. I bet he tried a number of options before he came up with Ulysses/sissies. What rhymes with Lady Chatterly? Moll Flanders? Plus those are harder to make scan. Anyway, you’re a clever bunch; I’m sure you could come up with some doozies, but Sherman went with Ulysses/sissies, and it works, unless you’ve actually read Joyce and don’t know what the common impression was.
Bingo.
Right, but I’m buying the assertion that people thought Ulysses was scandalous.
LOL
Right, assuming it’s not supposed to be funny.
Right. It’s either a minor logical inconsistency (but only given one interpretation, (a) above), or its just not funny. I think the lack of humor would be a far bigger disparity.
I congratulate you for your lack of a sense of humor.
No, there were no happy sounds yesterday because he didn’t get there until well into the afternoon, and all he did from the time he got off the bus until lights-out was get ordered around, led around, pushed around, lined up, lectured at, and ordered around some more.
I feel like I’ve wandered into Bizarro World with you.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s 1963 and you receive a letter from your son from camp with the exact wording as Allan’s (minus the closing line, of course).
Let’s also, for the moment, leave out the couplet concerning Ulysses. So you’re saying that if you received such a letter, you would immediately jump in the car and speed to the camp with the intent of “rescuing” your son — based on his statements about alligators, bears in the woods, ptomaine poisoning and malaria?
It wouldn’t once occur to you that alligators are not native to lakes in the northeastern United States; that a camp is unlikely to have been built in close proximity to a forest that bears inhabit; that an outbreak of ptomaine poisoning would afflict several campers (not just one) and result in parents of all children immediately being notified; and malaria in the United States had been completely eradicated ten years previous?
And it wouldn’t occur to you that these statements originated from your son’s overactive imagination rather than any reality? No, you would hurry with all possible speed to camp.
Because this is what you’re saying when you say that there is “no distinction” between these statements and the statement that the head coach is reading to 8- to 10-year-olds from Joyce’s Ulysses.
This statement is a lie, and cannot by any stretch be the product of an overactive imagination.
You’re further stating that a child who told the alligators/bears/ptomaine/malaria stories would be in trouble to exactly the same degree as a child who fabricated a story about the coach reading porn to children. And that the consequences to the child who told the lie (not to mention the coach who was the victim of it) would be “at least as severe” as those stemming from from him believing (through older campers’ influence) and retelling a story about alligators in the lake.
I hope you’ll clarify your position, because right now it’s not here to Albany, but rather here to Albania.
Thanks for your effort. I’ll respond just to this…
This is unwarranted, and frankly, insulting on several levels.
First, I’ve demonstrated, several times, that a humorous interpretation of the couplet with Homer rather than Joyce is more than possible. And I will demonstrate, in time, that this interpretation is not unique to me.
I’ve also noted that there is no requirement whatsoever that every single line in this song be laugh-out-loud funny. Some lines are already less funny than others. For example, the main humor in the early line about “poison ivy” is the clever rhyme with Joe Spivey. This is true, in the main, of several other of the song’s couplets as well.
“All the counselors hate the waiters” doesn’t exactly make me fall to the ground in helpless laughter either. And in fact, there’s very little humor content in the song’s entire bridge other than the bear and the “one whole day” bit.
Your position, and everyone else’s, seems to be that if the Ulysses line is not about Joyce, then the entire song collapses into unfunniness. That’s nonsense.
I find, and have always found, that Sherman’s song is plenty funny without resorting to Joyce. And I have a lot of company — namely, the greater percentage of people who bought the single and/or have listened to it for the past 51 years who don’t even know that there’s such a thing as a book by James Joyce called Ulysses.
(This is another $100 bet I’d be glad to make, by the way.)
L’il Allen has heard–wrongly–that “Ulysses” was a dirty book. (I’m from the generation after this song and in the mid '70s, about L’il Allan’s age, I’d heard that)
The head coach is afraid that the boys are sissies, not real men
Therefore;
A) Either the head coach, in 1963, thinks that the cure for being a sissy is to read the boys some girly/queer poetry from a guy who looked like [url=“The Twickenham Museum”]this[/url…and then, perhaps, to insure that they wouldn’t be sissies, he had them do interpretive dance and study flower arraignment before teaching them how to make their own quiches for din-din.
or
B) To cure them from being “sissies”, he’s reading to them from a “dirty book” which will put hair on their chests. (the joke being: *the book really isn’t dirty–even by 1963 standards–hell, by 1934 standards, the Supreme Court ruled that it wasn’t porn. However it still held a tinge of people thinking “it’s dirty” because of the lawsuit). It’s funny because there’s a logic that the coach would try to cure young sissies (in 1963) by reading to them from a dirty book (the fact that it’s not makes it funnier).
It makes absolutely no sense at all for the coach to try to cure them from being sissies by reading “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d/Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those/That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when/Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades/Vext the dim sea:” By '63 standards, reading some fop’s poetry is going to cause the boys to become light in the loafers.
The line could easily read:*
Coach says “sissies! That’s what we are!”
so he went and and bought us all a bunch of hookers.
*
(and it seems like you’d be arguing that by “hookers” Sherman meant “people who crochet”, not “prostitutes”)
The coach never read anything to them. L’il Allan’s making it all up.
Did you ever read Dr. Seuss’s “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street?”. The idea that a kid makes up a hyper-over-the-top exaggerated story, is an old, old trope. The kid isn’t thinking about the consequences, he just wants out of camp. You might as well argue that the Aesop’s Fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” didn’t think of the consequences he’ll face either.
It’s not child abuse even remotely by the standards of the time. Hell, it’s not child abuse by the standards of our time. There was an episode of the Simpsons where Homer was worried Bart was gay and played with the trope. There was an episode of Alice (or some mid-70’s single-mom with a teenage son sitcom) where Mel tries to take the kid to a prostitute for his 15th? birthday (it doesn’t happen, but the sitcom mom’s reaction–and by extention, our reaction–is eye-rolling "boys will be boys, even if they’re 50 years old. There’s no hint–not even a little–of “child abuse”.)
Not native, but the claim that there are alligators in the lake is not *quite *as preposterous as it might seem today. Remember that prior to 1967 baby alligators were still sold as pets–remember the *Leave It to Beaver *episode about the mail order gator?–and it was commonly rumored that the sewers of NYC hosted a population of alligators, the result of untold numbers of growing crocodilians being flushed or otherwise dumped when their owners discovered that alligators make really lousy pets.
So what if it is a lie? Did little boys in 1963 never lie? Is there a reason why a songwriter wouldn’t write a song in which a little boy told a lie? And can you really not see that the fact that the lie might have dire consequences only makes it funnier? I fail to see how this is any strike against the sensible interpretation that Sherman was singing about the Joyce novel and not the Odyssey.
Another fun data point: “Hello Muddah…” is set to the tune of Poncheilli’s “Dance of the Hours,” which also shows up in, you guessed it, the novel Ulysses, where in one scene it is remembered by Leopold Bloom.
Also, it’s been discussed (and of course aruged/contorted away) that the lyrics specifically say: “…something called Ulysses.” Called, as in title, what we call something. Sherman could have easily made the lyric “…and he reads to us about some guy called Ulysses” or something similar if he wanted us to think Homer.
Funny thing- I was listening to a youtube video of Allan singing the song in front of a live audience, and the Ulysses line got one of the biggest laughs. It was meant to be really funny, not a clunker by referring to Homer’s Odyssey in an non-standard way. In fact the couplets are each broken in groups that ramp up with the biggest laughs on the last line. Guess what, the Ulysses couplet end that grouping. Getting the biggest laugh and being the biggest shock. See how the second couplet is more shocking that first?
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh,
Here I am at Camp Grenada
Camp is very entertaining
and they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining.
I went hiking with Joe Spivy
He developed poison ivy
You remember Leonard Skinner
He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.
All the counselors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses.
Now I don’t want this should scare ya
But my bunkmate has malaria
You remember Jeffrey Hardy
They’re about to organize a searching party.
It was funny- the adults got the humor of a child first describing the camp from hell, followed by the twist at the end, that it was all made up to get him home.
I can assure you that EVERY child in 1963 was very familiar with the consequences of lying to his parents. Those who did anyway did it with the expectation their lies would not be discovered.
There is no way a lie about the coach reading from Joyce would NOT be discovered.
This is not in any way supported by the song’s lyrics. In fact, it’s contradicted by them. Up until the last moments young Allan is writing the letter, it has been raining, making “going out to play” impossible.
I agree that this is what he is trying to do. The disagreement has come over what underlies this effort:
• truthfulness, seasoned with exaggeration fueled by imagination (he really is somewhat scared and bored — my scenario — and he’s whining about it)
•complete fabrication from start to finish (none of this really happened; the kid has made up everything, including the coach’s reading — which takes a degree of calculation and willingness to lie most average kids are incapable of)
• some combination of the two (which is awkward and involves looking the other way on several matters)
All I’ve tried to do is present a rational explanation for what happens in the song that is consistent and requires no looking the other way or deciding to just not think about certain things.
The main rap against this interpretation is that one couplet of the song is less funny in my version. This seems to me to be a very shaky foundation.
Since the point is humor, that’s a pretty big problem. What makes the Joyce interpretation work is because it is the shocking choice.
The water isn’t just cold- it has ALLIGATORS!
The food isn’t bad- WE’RE BEING POISONED
When we hike WE GET POSION IVY!
The coaches just aren’t toughing us up- THEY READ TO US FROM GREEK CLASSICS! Oh wait, that doesn’t work. THEY READ TO US FROM A CURRENTLY KNOWN PROVOCATIVE BOOK!
Yes. And the joke would have been equally funny if say, the line was something about how the cook serves gruel and makes them take seconds, oh, and his name is Chef Donner. Or the coach makes them swim naked and he looks like [insert notorious pedophile], etc., etc. Those are off color jokes that a 10 year old wouldn’t actually write about but are funny to adults.
The song is funny because it takes the mundane complaints that kids at camp write home about (like Sherman’s own kid) and exaggerates them.
The whole issue of whether the kid is lying or not, etc. evaporates if you look at it simply as a guy making fun of his kid’s letters from camp.
