I’D be curious to learn what Robert Sherman* might have to say, were he to peruse the thread…
*Not the Disney songwriter; the former game show developer, and son of Allan Sherman.
We had poison oak nearly every day, sometimes more often. Hardly unlikely.
As a one time counselor, we did despise the waiters.
We did scare the kids with stories about bears, mtn lions, etc.
At least once a season a kid got lost.
On the first day, quite a few kids harfed up their meals. Either they ate too much, they were unused to that food, or they had nervous stomachs, homesick, etc.
Little Allan?
Sherman’s song has the kid claiming that all this happened in one day:
[ul]
[li]Poison ivy developed after a hike [/li][li]Ptomaine poisoning from a dinner [/li][li]Universally-hated waiters [/li][li]Alligators in a New York State lake [/li][li]Being read to from “something called Ulysses” [/li][li]Malaria in a bunkmate [/li][li]A missing camper (and a searching party being organized to find him) [/li][li]Boy-eating bears in the forest[/ul][/li]
Note that it’s not just “harfed up” meals, it’s ptomaine poisoning. And actual malaria and actual alligators (not just counselor stories).
Clearly the list of things purportedly happening in one day isn’t something intended to be taken as a literal set of occurrences. It’s a comically piled-on set of woeful claims that supposedly happened within 24 hours.
That’s not what you’re claiming, is it?
Well two things- he never says there are bears or that anyone was eaten by one “I might get eaten by a bear”. Next, no, I wasnt but you claim all those things are “comically unlikely” and they aren’t.
Note there is no real “Ptomaine poisoning”, it’s just what kids were claiming for years from any bad food. It was a meme or perhaps UL. If you got sick, you must have had “Ptomaine poisoning”.
I did not know that! (Thanks.)
As for the list of troubles that Sherman has his fictional camper offering to his parents, to persuade them to let him come home: I don’t think anyone’s claimed that none of them could have occurred in real life–just that each woeful item is supposed to raise a smile or laugh in the song’s audience.
Also: When I first presented the list, my claim was that the items were comically unlikely OR comically exaggerated OR comically inappropriate. Even if I failed to type out all that verbiage in each subsequent post, none of my arguments or positions depend upon each and every item being specifically “comically unlikely.” (Though I would posit that the conglomeration is pretty comically unlikely to have occurred on the camper’s first day.)
You are welcome.
I concede that point. If we posist that “bears” and "alligators’ are just scare stories it’s not too crazy.
Poison Ivy, Day 1? I saw it. Oddly, one of my jobs was giving the Poison Oak talk, Day 2. Too late!:smack:
Vomiting kid after dinner, day 1? Saw it, made waiter clean it!
First day, quite common. Actually, most common.
Hated waiters? Yep.
Sick kid with a fever, where some kids whisper it’s Malaria? Not impossible. Altitude sickness was common Day 1. Only 7,000 feet, but yeah.
A missing camper (and a searching party being organized to find him)?? Ok, there we get sorta unlikely, but on D1 we did have kids lost trying to find their bunkroom after dark.
I know. I looked at the thread when it started and thought it was answered definitively in the first few posts. There has never been any doubt that Sherman meant Joyce’s Ulysses.
The only thing funnier than claiming he was referring to Homer is the claim that people weren’t spending almost every waking moment scheming to get sexual references past the would-be censors in the music of the 50s and 60s. Someone who claims this and is willing to give money to anybody with more musical knowledge needs to stand on streetcorners and give out $100 bills to everyone who walks by. Including deaf toddlers.
< deep breath >
First, let’s go back to the initial post in this thread:
There are really TWO questions here:
[ol]
[li]What did Alan Sherman intend this line to mean when he wrote it?[/li][li]How was this line interpreted by those who listened to this song and bought the record?[/li][/ol]
Nowhere in the OP is there an indication that only the first question should be answered — but that’s what virtually everyone in this thread has sought to do.
I will point out again that, in the absence of a direct quote from Sherman or an extremely close associate, we can only guess at the answer to this question. Most have presented evidence that the Joyce interpretation “works.” I have presented evidence that the Homer interpretation also “works.”
Despite repeated efforts to pick it apart, I continue to believe that the Homer interpretation “works” just as well as the Joyce one. Further, I find it amusing that the same people who wave away all the inconsistencies in the Joyce interpretation with a simple “It’s humor, it doesn’t have to be consistent or make sense” are the same folks who hold the Homer interpretation to the strictest of standards; e.g. “It doesn’t follow the (allegedly) carefully plotted-out sequence of increasingly alarming horrors” or “It’s just boring, not horrifying like everything else” or “It wouldn’t cause the parents to rush to the camp to pull their son out” (ignoring the fact that NONE of the items listed would cause any sane parent to do so).
Addressing the second question, I firmly believe that a much larger percentage of the total universe of people who bought the “Hello Muddah! Hello Faddah!” 45 and/or listened to it being played repeatedly on Top 40 radio in 1963 chose the Homer interpretation.
I will try to make the following statement without being “insulting” (and again, it’s amusing that all of the very real insults that have been aimed at me in this thread are ignored because they emanate from people who hold the majority view)…
The screen name of the person to whom I’m responding in the post is a propos. When it comes to answering Question #2 above, the mistake that’s being made in this thread is one I identified in an earlier post. And that is, thinking that everyone else in the world is “just like me.” In other words, because the (admittedly) very knowledgeable and well-educated denizens of this board immediately think “Joyce,” therefore everyone else immediately thinks this.
Frankly, anyone who thinks the larger percentage of individuals I identified three paragraphs ago were keenly aware of James Joyce and his book Ulysses in 1963, or that this is the thought that would be triggered first when the name was uttered (as opposed to the thought of a heroic warrior of ancient times) needs to get out more and mingle with a few people who aren’t “just like them.”
I conducted a survey among a group of my friends (whom some have also seen fit to insult), most of whom were around in 1963 and knew the song well. I’ve reproduced the Homer to Joyce ratio (9-4) from my survey, and have admitted that it’s a small sample size.
But there’s no reason to believe that this same ratio would not be found in a larger sample size. If anything, since all but one of this sample group are college graduates, the ratio would probably be even more in favor of Homer if the net were cast wider. (For example, it might be instructive to research what percentage of Americans of various ages who were listening to this song in 1963 went on to become college graduates.)
Let me reemphasize my first point. There are TWO questions to answer here:
1. What did Sherman intend?
We can only infer, we can’t know for certain without a statement from him.
2. What did the public perceive?
We can make guesses every bit as educated as the guesses we make about Sherman in answering this question. And this second question has a further component: what did radio programmers of the day perceive?
Exploring this component has led to an interesting side issue about what was and was not permissible on Top 40 radio in 1963 and has ranged beyond Sherman’s song. I will address this issue in subsequent posts.
Well, don’t do it on my behalf, since I couldn’t care less anymore.
I’ve moved on to the “Reese’s Cups- candy bar yea or nay” debate.
I am in awe of your reasoned and well argued debate here!
Show me the “facts” that the “cocaine” line in "I Get a Kick Out of You’ was more widely recorded and sung than its less-offensive substitute.
In fact, it was you and others who “moved the goalposts,” not me.
The discussion specifically originated out of the question “What was permissible on Top 40 radio aimed at teens and subteens in the period leading up to and including 1963?” I have made the point that the rules governing this subcategory of pop culture were different from those that applied before there WAS such a thing as Top 40 radio (starting roughly in 1955-56).
I noted that while “Hello Muddah! Hello Faddah!” was originally performed for and released on album to an adult audience, once it was determined it would be released as a single to the Top 40 market, the rules changed completely. This was music aimed primarily at a teen and pre-teen audience. I gave an example from 2 1/2 years after “Hello Muddah! Hello Faddah!” that shows how these rules were strictly enforced. I can cite additional examples.
Thus, all the examples you gave and continue to give of Broadway show tunes aimed at an adult audience from an earlier era aren’t relevant to this discussion at all.
I’ll have more to say about this in a reply to a subsequent post.
There’s nothing “magic” at all about my position; it reflects a reality of the times and the particular genre of pop culture that’s under discussion. And indeed, the only way you can get around that reality is to ignore it…which is exactly what you’ve done to-date.
How old were you when “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” came out? I mean when it was contemporary on the radio, not when you heard it later as an “Oldie”?
Please cite examples of my insults. For every one you provide, I’ll give you five insults of equal or greater strength directed at me. And I won’t even have to resort to the several that are part of your post.
The only weakness anyone has been able to cite in the Homer interpretation is that the song as a whole isn’t as funny if you use this rather than the Joyce interpretation.
But rather than looking at one line in isolation, I have given a consistent interpretation of the song from start to finish. You can’t say that interpretation doesn’t work if you’re looking at the rest of the song in a different way.
That is,
a) if you think the young camper is making the whole thing up (which I, along with several others here and 100% of those I polled reject); or,
b) if you think the camper is trying to “alarm” or “shock” his parents into taking him home (which I also reject — he’s simply whining because he so far hasn’t had a good time, and his whine disappears instantaneously as soon as the weather changes);
then it’s no good claiming that the Homer interpretation “doesn’t work.” It doesn’t work in those scenarios, but these are not, in my view, the scenarios portrayed in the song.
So “disagreeing with everyone else” = “pretending to be smarter than everyone else”?
Whereas those who have disagreed with me (quite frequently in a superior, condescending manner) aren’t pretending to be smarter than me?
Not by me. My position has been, however, that it’s perfectly reasonable that comedy can be and was frequently made without resorting to anything outrageous or totally beyond the pale. I called it “gentle humor” in an earlier post.
Your first example meets none of your criteria. As Dr. Deth has shown, neither does your third. Examples 4 and 8 are not only “unlikely” but impossible in the real world, but entirely likely in the child’s imagination. Examples 2, 6 and 7 represent events that happened but were misinterpreted/wildly exaggerated by the young camper.
Not a single one of these references would shock or alarm a rational parent who received this letter. Nor would example 5…assuming that the reading was from Homer or Tennyson.
However, if #5 is actually reading to campers ages 8-10 from James Joyce’s novel, we’ve suddenly entered a whole new realm…a realm that involves sex and young children.
I’ll spare you the singing of the song I’ve sung on several occasions in past posts. I’ll simply say “consistent vs. inconsistent.” Whatever commonalities you may find between these various elements, you cannot equate sex and young children to the rest. It’s in a completely different sphere.
All of these are intended to be funny in their exaggeration, unlikelihood, and/or inappropriateness. They are intended to raise a laugh. They aren’t intended to be a commentary on what a 1960s coach was likely to find inspirational, or what fears a 1960s coach might have had about being criticized for what he read to kids, or anything at all about the real-world sociological aspects of 1960s sleep-away camps.
The references are there to make listeners laugh.
[/QUOTE]
My point is that the Homer interpretation accomplishes the same thing, without the whopping dissonance of the sex/children part of it. You don’t have to say “Well, we just won’t think about that.”
And my contention is also that this is the path the greater number of listeners to “Hello Muddah! Hello Faddah!” followed.
Ah, but you’ve forgotten the song’s second couplet:
Camp is very entertaining
And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining
This couplet also sets up the ultimate punch line at the end. The bad weather stops, and suddenly all is well and all complaints of every kind are forgotten.
The child has detailed a series of experiences that do indeed have one thing in common: they are unpleasant in some way, and they’re interfering with what was expected to be an enjoyable experience. This can (and does) encompass boredom, fear (though it’s exaggerated, irrational fear) and general discomfort.
On this point, I respectfully disagree. My contention (expressed several times, including quite recently) is that he’s simply whining, something every parent has experienced in his or her child. He’s also hardly the first child to be sent to summer camp who gets homesick or who doesn’t (initially) like or feel comfortable in his or her surroundings.
Had the phrase existed at the time, the response of any parent receiving this letter would have been “Suck it up…we’ll see you in two weeks.”
As I said long ago, to believe the “alarm his parents with Joyce” theory, you have to first believe that an average 8 to 10-year-old child in 1963 would have any idea whatsoever what James Joyce’s Ulysses is. I posed the question long ago of how exactly he would come by this knowledge.
I would love for proponents of the Joyce theory to give an honest answer to these questions:
-
When you were 8 to 10-years-old, had you ever heard of James Joyce’s Ulysses?
-
If so, how did you learn of it?
-
Would you have, at this age, been devious enough to make up a complete lie about an adult’s actions, a lie that would land him in very serious trouble were it true, in order to get what you wanted? Would you have given no thought to the consequences of this action?
And I know that yours and others’ answers to this will be “It’s just a comedy record, so all of that is irrelevant.”
I just find all of this more difficult to dismiss than everyone else. And luckily, it’s not an issue for me if I go with the perfectly logical Homer interpretation.
Very true. Very, very true. Very, very, very true.
- No I did not.
- N/A
- No.
And it’s not irrelevant- the absurdity of the comment is what makes it funny! Of course a normal 10 year old wouldn’t know about these things. But a fictional 10 year old (like all precocious kids on TV shows and movies- that seem a bit to savvy or knowledgable beyond their years) would. And that makes it funny!
I love your implication that the Homer interpretation is the “logical choice” so where does that leave the Joyce folks? I guess we’re all just durpy, illogical folks, hurr hurr.
This proves absolutely nothing. Certainly Sherman performed before adult audiences, but it’s not like ALL of his material was blue. Most comics varied their shtick depending on the audience.
As I’ve said, “Hello Muddah! Hello Faddah!” was originally performed before an adult audience. But regardless of his original intentions, once the song was released as a Top 40 single, the rules applying to it changed.
Wow, you shift goal posts like nobody’s business.
It can’t be a blue song because those were for adult audiences.
The Camp song was for an adult audience
But wait, it still couldn’t have been blue because it was later picked up for Top 40…?
So he changed not a word of the song, but somehow the song changed? Wow.
This is something else I’ve been curious about. Did anything in particular happen around the era of 1963 that brought Joyce’s book into notable public consciousness? The court trials involving obscenity charges against it took place in the 1920s, and all proceedings concluded in 1934.
So what would have made the novel particularly top-of-mind in 1963? I’m just asking.
Actually Homer’s poem that features a character name Ulysses in many translations makes perfect sense if you look at what a dim-witted coach might seize upon to turn potential “sissies” into “manly men” — that is, tales of rugged adventure.
It makes far more sense than Joyce’s book for this purpose. Despite repeated pleas, no one has yet reproduced a single passage from Joyce’s novel that would accomplish the coach’s stated goal.
Um, except that it’s actually The Jimmy Joyce Singers and that they really existed and performed as session vocalists for many artists of the day. (The linked Google Search produces over 31,000 hits.)
It’s hardly surprising “literary critics” would give this answer. It’s also not surprising that the average literary critic would know little to nothing about how the teen-oriented pop music charts of 1963 worked.
I’m far more interested in what the listening public “understood.”
What evidence do you have to back this assertion up? Specifically, what evidence do you have that says it was perfectly OK in 1963 to mention what everyone keeps insisting was a notoriously “dirty” novel in the context of a song played on Top 40 radio? And to have the mention of it involve reading from it to young children?
Already dealt with several times. Also, I don’t know that we can ascribe one universal humor standard to the totality of the listening audience.
Which is another reason why reading it to 8 to 10-year-old pre-sexual boys makes no sense.