In 1964, due to the popularity of “A Letter from Camp” (aka Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh), Allan Sherman released a follow-up song which contained this verse:
… It’s the same basic joke: Lenny Bruce was well-known as a “dirty” comic–in fact, convicted of “obscenity” (my own quotes, there) in the year of the song’s release, 1964. The basic joke, of course, is that age-inappropriate, so-called smutty fare is being served up to little kids at their comically-disreputable camp.
I’m amazed at the number of items people here seem content to ignore, no matter how many times I bring them up.
YES, some of the things Alan brings up in his letter are fanciful (alligators, malaria), but they can very easily be explained as the products of the overactive and fearful imagination of a first-time camper — and of course, would be instantly recognized as such by his parents. There is no requirement that they be things that Alan “makes up” in order to further persuade his parents. They are simply added to the pile of things, real and imagined, that make him long to escape his present environment.
But now, comes the coach’s reading, which posters here have taken two views of:
• The coach really did read to 8- to 10-year-olds from Joyce’s book…yet there is nothing remotely “off” about the notion that an adult would do such a thing…no thought among supporters of this theory of the consequences that would result from this were it true.
• The coach did not read to 8- to 10-year-olds from Joyce’s book…rather, it’s a complete and total fabrication Alan concocts in an effort to “scare” his parents into bringing him home. And again, there is no thought among supporters of this theory as to what Alan would face once this lie was found out, as it surely would be.
Both of these views are completely far-fetched, especially when compared with the simple notion that the coach was reading from Homer’s work about Ulysses — which comports perfectly with the coach’s (possibly misguided, but still sincere) belief that doing so will head off the possibility of his charges becoming “sissies.”
Oh yeah…and I’m still waiting for a single poster to explain how reading from Joyce will achieve the coach’s goal. What is this…about the fourth or fifth time I’ve asked for this?
Again, I congratulate you all for your remarkable propensity to ignore.
Mad magazine used that type of humor often, and their audience was directed more at children than adults.
Once again, there was no coach, no such goal, there were no children, there was no such camp, it’s a funny line, it doesn’t have to be ultimately sensible and logically consistent.
And finally, there’s nothing funny about a reference to the Odyssey or an unknown poem.
However, in the original song, Alan is describing something that has already happened. It is a real event (as noted, I reject the idea that it’s something he’s completely made up).
In the classic pop music tradition of “You’ve had a big hit…now come up with another record that’s a virtual remake of your first one in every way,” Sherman made a follow-up and went for a new set of jokes based on clever rhymes — which in the end, formed most of the basis of the original song (Spivey/poison ivy, waiters/aligators, sissies/Ulysses, etc.).
In the extremely unlikely event that Lenny Bruce had been invited to do his act at a camp for 8- to 10-year-olds, do you think he would have done exactly the same act he did for adults?
Yeah, I know…it’s fantasy, not reality. And it has the advantage of never having to happen.
But something did happen in the original song, and there are three possibilities:
The coach’s reading did happen, and he read from Joyce.
The coach’s reading never happened at all, and is a lie made up by Alan.
The coach’s reading happened, and he read from Homer.
I’ve detailed several times over several problems with the first two interpretations. My point all along has been that the song works just fine with the third interpretation…while also getting rid of a whole lot of very problematical stuff…the stuff that everyone else here is content to ignore.
Examples? MAD Magazine was certainly irreverent, but I recall no instance at all of them making reading age-inappropriate material to youngsters the basis of humor.
In fact, I happened to come across an issue of MAD recently, and read it for the first time in what must have been 35 years or more at the least. I was a little surprised to see references to “boobs” and a far higher concentration of rather unfettered sexual and scatological humor in its pages…something I don’t remember from my readings of long ago.
I again am compelled to repeat the song’s refrain: “One of these things is not like the others.” The gulf between Joyce and everything else that is described in the song is huge. And I disagree generally about consistency. I can think of few songs outside of totally and purposefully absurd ones (e.g., “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd”) that don’t have some kind of internal logic.
Can you think of any with a gap as wide as the one that Joyce tears into this one?
But this line doesn’t have to be particularly “funny” in the context of the song.
How knee-slappingly hilarious is “I went hiking with Joe Spivey/He developed poison ivy”? The humor here comes entirely from the unexpected rhyme.
So it is with sissies/Ulysses. It’s a clever rhyme, but in terms of the content of this passage, the passage’s primary value is just as another in a long line of Alan’s whiny complaints.
By the way, I should add to the last post that people who read MAD Magazine at least knew up-front what to expect.
I haven’t been able to determine whether “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” was actually performed in front of a live audience as it seems to be, or whether it was a studio recording with canned laughter added after the fact. (Does anyone know?)
If it really was performed in front of an adult audience, then they might have been primed to expect “adult” humor. But regardless of whether it was or not, it was released to a mass audience as a single and played on Top 40 radio, whose audience was an all-age one going down to pre-teens and lower.
As someone who lived through that era, I can tell you that standards were strict, and I have a hard time believing the self-appointed radio “censors” of the day would have let the song pass if they believed the Ulysses reference was unequivocally to Joyce’s book.
Which is why I’ve said all along that those who have made such a point of the book’s notoriety are actually making my case for me.
One poster, more thoughtful than most, posited that it could be a “double-meaning” type of thing, comprising a sly side reference to Joyce using the cover of it actually being Homer.
I could live with that as a possibility. But that is a different position from most articulated here, which have been along the lines of “It’s Joyce and only Joyce, you moron!”
I would never call you a moron. Heck, I’ve been in the “lone arguer against the multitudes” position on more than one topic (on more than one message board), over the years.
Sometimes, I think, I was in the right. Other times, though, I suspect I may have been in the wrong: cognitive dissonance set in and I simply couldn’t dislodge the bit from between my teeth.
When my kids were little they listened to a kid’s program on a college station in Philadelphia. The woman who ran the program played kids songs, including this one, all the time. She was very concerned about age appropriateness. She also played Fish Heads, but mentioned in her newsletter that parents wanting that song should buy a Dr. Demento collection, not the Barnes & Barnes CD is came from. But she played this song, and since she kept on playing it, no one ever complained.
I lived back then, but a reference to what used to be considered a dirty book with a non-dirty title was not going to get anyone in trouble.
BTW, the purpose of the letter was to shock the parents enough so that they’d pull the kid out of there. I really don’t think the coach reading a classic work was going to do that, do you?
Which not only wouldn’t have conveyed that the coach was doing the reading to the kids, but also wouldn’t have scanned properly in the context of the song’s music.
I would be much more disposed to consider that I was in the wrong if someone…anyone…would address the multitude of questions I’ve posed in the course of all this that have gone completely unanswered.
So far, though, most have been content to just pretend they’re not there.
No, actually, my opponents are failing to even show up in the ring for the bout.
I make arguments in support of my position, and make arguments against the prevailing position, and pose questions in an effort to clarify both kinds of arguments. Those questions are ignored, and the silence is deafening.
Do I really have to pose these questions for the umpteenth time?
I’ve shown how it makes perfect sense, much more sense, in fact, if it’s Homer.
But that line doesn’t have to bear the entire burden of making the song funny “all by itself,” which is what some people seem to be asking of it. If it’s Homer instead of Joyce, it works just fine as yet another in a long list of whiny complaints by the camper…no more or less significant than all of his other whines.
I’m good, thanks.
And I agree with you about Alan Sherman. I enjoyed the song greatly at the time of its release, and I can still enjoy it now. (I better, since I’ve been living with it for the past week!)
May I introduce to you the collected works ofTom Leher (boy genius, Harvard math professor, guest on Johnny Carson) some of which were recorded as early as 1953. Some of his child-oriented story lines include:
The Old Dope Peddler – “He gives the kids free samples/Because he knows full well/That today’s young innocent faces/Will be tomorrow’s clientele.”
My Home Town – “The guy that taught us math/Who never took a bath/Acquired a certain measure of renown/And after school he sold the most amazing pictures/In my home town.”
Everybody Eat – “For example there’s an uncle who when he’s drunk’ll be a real pest/And cousin Julia is actin’ childish to put it mildish/Hey you kids I don’t know who just did that but it’s gross/Then Al begins to smoke and tells a dirty joke when Grandma’s comatose.”
Be Prepared – “Be prepared! That’s the Boy Scouts’ solemn creed/Be prepared! And be clean in word and deed/Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”
Okay. Let’s analyze the child’s complaints in the couplets comprising the first half of the song.
As I read them, it goes:
Bad weather
Poison ivy
Food poisoning
Dangerous animals
Child-inappropriate material
Malaria
Disappearance
Notice the gradual increase of severity. It starts with mild complaint, then escalates to legitimate threats.
In your view, DChord, it goes:
Bad weather
Poison ivy
Food poisoning
Dangerous animals
Boring literature
Malaria
Disappearance
Strikes me as a little incongruous and out-of-sequence.
It’s also a terrible joke, which is the most damning aspect. Sherman is funny. A kid whining about reading his coach reading The Odyssey is not funny and barely makes sense. A kid lying that his coach is reading from a famously dirty book is funny and absolutely makes sense (even if it’s a stretch for a kid to “actually” make that claim).
The song is a child trying to convince his parents to take him out of camp. He is listing increasingly concerning elements. The final lines indicate that the list was probably just lies (except for the weather).
You’re overthinking the narrative and underthinking the joke.
It was the early 1960’s. Sex (and dirty books) in the media was taboo, and so intrinsically funny in and of itself. It’s hard to realize how clean comics had to work today, post-Lenny Bruce and post-Carlin.
DO you really thing parents would find their kids being read to from a dirty book a huge gap of seriousness beyond Ptomaine poisioning, malaria, and swimming with alligators?
The entire song is a kid making up bullshit to beg or scare his parents into coming and getting him home from a camp he hates(at least until the last verse).
It’s very simple, along with his other desperate attempts like claiming Malaria and poising he also throws in that they are reading dirty books, which he, in a predictable childlike way, feigns ignorance of by saying “something like” as though he knows nothing about it himself.
I doubt you’ll ever be able to find a site where Sherman says he was talking about the Joyce book, because he didn’t have to. It was unequivocally clear to everybody that he was.
I’m glad you brought up Joe Spivey and the poison ivy.
If they arrived at camp yesterday, and it’s been raining the whole time, when did Allan and Joe get an opportunity to go hiking?
Here’s what I think happened:
Allan arrives at camp Granada on, let’s say, Friday afternoon. It was a long bus ride, Allan has a tendency to get a little carsick, and he got there feeling cranky and out of sorts. In addition, this is his first time going to sleep-away camp, and he’s kinda there against his will; he was not consulted in the decision that landed him here.
The wooded area the camp occupies is a brand new environment for Allan. The sounds aren’t what he’s used to, the cabins aren’t air-conditioned (probably don’t even have an oscillating fan), so the humidity is strange to him as well, AND THE AIR SMELLS FUNNY.
He’s surrounded by dozens, and maybe even a couple of hundred, other boys, some of them veterans of the Granada experience, who are all excited, greeting their pals from last summer, and making enough noise to raise the dead. The only faces he even recognizes belong to three guys he knows from Hebrew school, Joseph Spivey, Leonard Skinner, and Jeffrey Hardy, and he’s not really great friends with any of them. In the midst of all this bonhomie and good cheer, he’s feeling isolated and lonely.
He sees a lake with canoes and mini-sailboats tied up at the dock, signs directing the campers to the baseball field, the archery range, the hiking trails, the mess hall. But it is to the mess hall he is herded, for check-in, where he receives his cabin assignment. The cabin counselor instructs him and his cabin-mates to unpack their trunks and select their bunk beds (needless to say, Allan does NOT get the bunk he wants), then brings them all back to the mess hall for a dinner of rapidly-cooling beanie-weenie, Brussels sprouts, and milk that is either non-fat (which he finds watery), or whole (which he finds too oily).
After dinner, the crowd is brought out to the campfire ring, to attempt to digest their meal, while the camp director welcomes them to ORIENTATION. The staff is introduced, each member saying a few words (notably, the head coach boasts that Camp Granada has never sent anyone back home to his folks who wasn’t ALL BOY, and never will), and all the rules for Good Camper behavior are laid before them (reveille is at 6:30, beds are to be made every morning, no lying in or on your bed except between “Taps” and reveille; mealtimes are 7:00, noon, and 6:00 p.m. SHARP; disrespect to the counselors or to any staff member will not be tolerated; the nurse’s office is over there, the nurse is qualified to provide first aid for any non-life-threatening injury, but is not to be approached because anyone misses their mommy; and so on, ad infinitum). “Taps” is played, the campers are dismissed to their cabins, lights-out in fifteen minutes.
Allan does not sleep well. The mattress has the wrong kind of lumps in it. The blanket is too thin. The breathing of a dozen slumbering boys is starting to creep him out.
Camp Granada has not made a good first impression on young Allan.
Saturday morning, 0630. The bugle blows Reveille. For a few moments, Allan wonders dimly where he is, then realization dawns. Camp Granada, his home for the next five weeks. Ugh. Reluctantly, he rises, puts on yesterday’s outfit, kinda-sorta smooths the blanket on his bunk, and trudges over to the mess hall for breakfast. Pancakes and orange juice. Not too bad, but he’s just not in the mood to be cheered up. The kid next to him is hogging all the syrup, and the paper napkins at this table just fall apart too easily.
At the end of the meal, his cabin leader stands at the head of the table and orders everyone back to the cabin, where he instructs the boys in the art of making a bunk bed properly; don’t forget, the cabins are inspected every day, the director told ya that last night. Once this is completed, the counselor says “All right, your Camp Granada good times are about to start! But first, I want everybody to get out your paper, pencils, envelopes, and stamps, and write a letter home to your folks! They’re probably missing you already! Hand your letter to me on your way out the door, and I’ll see to it they get in the mail. Hop to it!”
Everyone sits on the floor at the foot of his bunk, and starts writing. As they finish, they hand their letters to the counselor, who gives them a cursory glance (just to make sure they’re not trying to pass off a blank sheet of paper as a letter home), then sends the boys on their way. Allan’s got some writer’s block, though. The one theme that’s going through his mind is “I hate this place. I’ll never make it through five weeks! Why did they have to send me here in the first place? They must hate me. I gotta get them to pull me out.”
Then inspiration strikes. If Muddah and Fadduh think this place is bad for me, or too dangerous for me, they’ll have to bring me home.
Let’s see, I can tell them it hasn’t stopped raining since I got here. I can’t walk two steps without getting poison ivy. Ooh, the food makes people SICK! Good one. Uhh, the staff can’t get along with each other; I’m pretty sure I saw an alligator in the lake.
Hmm, what was that book called on Muddah and Faddah’s bookshelf that they nearly plotzed that time that all I did was pull it down and look at the cover? Ulysses, that’s right. How 'bout I tell them that the coach is reading it to us?
What else? They got a nurse here, what do they expect, diseases? I’ll give them a disease. Oh, and people get lost in the woods here ALL THE TIME, yeah, that’s the ticket.
Take me home, folks, please! There’s bears out here in the woods; how would you like it if I got eaten by one? Come o-o-o-on, I can be good, you don’t have to punish me any more, I’ve learned my lesson, this place is awful, I know all about it; I’ve been here a WHOLE DAY, after all!
Bargaining. Have I tried bargaining yet? Lessee, remind them how sweet I am, how much I love my baby brother, ooh, I’ll even hold still for Aunty Bertha’s sloppy old-lady kisses!
At this point, inspiration peters out and writer’s cramp begins to set in. Allan sets the letter down, shakes out his wrist, and paces the floor while he tries to think of a strong close (he briefly considers, “Regards, Allan” before deciding that no one will get that joke for another thirty-five years). Noticing the sounds of happiness outside, he goes over to the window, and looks out upon dozens (possibly hundreds) of boys, all doing the kind of things that had been depicted in the brochures he had been sure were faked when he saw them at home.
“Waitaminute. I gotta get in on that” he says to himself. He picks up his letter, and is just about to hand it to the counselor, when, in horrified realization, he considers what his parents will likely do when they read the nightmare tale he has spun. What to do, what to do? Chuck the whole thing and start another letter? No way, he’s wasted enough time already.
So he adds the disclaimer at the end, hands it to the counselor, and zooms out to the fun beyond the door, just as fast as his legs will carry him.
