Okay, I skipped the last three pages of this conversation. I couldn’t make it past “we come from different cultural milieux”.
Maybe it has something to do with me being stuck in Detroit airport, waiting for a delayed flight, but I hate you all.
;
To think, I went to the trouble to ID the Mystery Man on Johnny Carson and you do this to me. Nobody knows what Allan Sherman was thinking, and nobody ever will.
I have shown several times over how it works with the third interpretation. I have noted that the passage regarding Ulysses becomes, when it’s Homer in question, just another one of the things that happens to young Allan in camp that is either annoying, fear-inducing (however unjustifiably so) or boring.
Apparently I have to offer a further explanation. I don’t know how it was in your high school, but in mine, the head football coach taught Biology, and one of his assistants taught “Health” (whatever that was…mostly it was showing those ridiculous 50s-era filmstrips so ripe for lampooning today).
I can say as a veteran of more than one of the classes taught by each that there was plenty of unintentional humor content inherent in them. In the case of Sherman’s song, it would come from the notion of the head coach — surely not an intellectual giant — having the notion that he could ensure his charges would not be “sissies” by reading to them from an epic poem a couple of millennia old. (And I am STILL waiting, after multiple appeals, for a single poster to tell me how reading from Joyce will achieve the coach’s stated goal, regardless of what interpretation you give to “sissies.” The silence remains deafening.)
I can particularly imagine my Health teacher rendering Homer with his patented “dem”'s and “doze”'s. Regardless of the level of the translation he picked, there would still probably be a great deal of stilted language that would baffle 8- to 10-year-olds.
And because he would, it is hoped, make some effort to set the stage and the characters, it’s likely that he would not have arrived at any of the exciting action passages in the course of the first day’s reading. Thus, young Allan’s confused and negative reaction to the experience — as I’ve said all along, just another of many such reactions to his initial camp experience.
Again as I’ve said repeatedly, every single thing that young Allan relates in his letter is not required to be “shocking or inappropriate.”
How “shocking or inappropriate” is an all-day rain? A case of poison ivy? Animosity between counselors and waiters? A child getting sick after dinner in the mess hall? As I’ve noted, this last and all the other conditions or incidents he relates are simply the product of Allan’s overactive imagination…something any parent receiving such a letter would immediately see through, smile benignly and write back “we’ll see you in two weeks.”
The coach reading from Homer easily fits into the same category as every one of these incidents. A coach reading from Joyce does not, but is in a completely different category.
Correct, up to this point.
…or who is simply whining, as any parent will tell you 8- to 10-year-olds are prone to do when things aren’t going their way. The song’s bridge, with its melodramatic minor-key strains accompanying “Take me hoooome,” reinforces this interpretation.
Explained away multiple times as overactive imagination, instantly recognizable by any sensible parent.
“One of these things is not like the others.” C’mon, class, you can do it.
It makes perfect sense as yet another of the overblown “privations” young Allan has had to endure. A boring reading couched in archaic language fits in perfectly with all of his other whines.
No, he makes a general reference to “something called Ulysses.” If the coach has not shown the book he’s reading from to the campers (which is unlikely if he’s reading to a whole roomful of them), and if it’s one of many translations that calls its protagonist “Ulysses” rather than Odysseus (noted by more than one poster here), then young Allan will come to the conclusion that Ulysses is the title of the work from the many mentions of this name in the text.
As noted earlier, the Lenny Bruce performance is scheduled for “next week” in the sequel. Unlike the head coach incident, it hasn’t happened yet…and will never happen before the song concludes. Thus, it resides in the realm of pure fantasy…a clever, throwaway line.
I’m out of time for a full response to the rest of your post and others for the time being, but I wanted to address this…
I wrote:
To which you replied:
I believe you’ve misunderstood me here.
The “Allan” I refer to in my statement above is the “young Allan,” the character who is writing the letter and who is, in my view, not making up anything he’s writing in it (discounting those things his imagination has exaggerated) — not Allan Sherman, the creator and performer of the song.
I certainly hold Allan Sherman in the same esteem as everyone else here.
Before I go, while I don’t agree with your interpretation, I must offer my congratulations for the sheer time and effort that went into your response — and my thanks for sharing my affliction of diarrhea of the mouth!
I have no problem with you saying that you do not agree with my interpretation. If you return to the thread tomorrow, I’d be interested in hearing why you don’t find it at least as plausible as yours.
As a specific example, in a song from an early album which uses matzoh balls for shortnin’ bread, he ends with
"Matzo - <pause> oh - <pause> balls!
My 10 year old self knew this was borderline dirty, and I asked my father what it meant. So much for no off color material - unless he was talking about rubber balls, of course.
Marylin Monroe to Mr. and Mrs. Miller at Passover: “They’re lovely. Where’s the rest of the animal?”
My father told me that when I was about 10. I don’t think I knew who MM was then, surely not Jewish playwrights.
The reason I find my interpretation more plausible than yours is that in mine, young Allan doesn’t have to tell a single lie when he writes his letter.
Every single thing he describes either happens in real life, or at least happens in his mind due to his overactive imagination.
I’ve been over this several times, but even the outlandish things he mentions (ptomaine poisoning, alligators in the lake, bears in the woods, malaria) can be seen as fueled either by speculation (Leonard Skinner got sick after dinner…he must have ptomaine poisoning!) or the taunts of older campers made to scare the newbies (“Pssst! Be careful…the lake has alligators in it!”).
He doesn’t have to lie about the head coach either, because the poor sap, in a misguided and ill-informed effort to make sure all of his charges are toughened up, really does decide that reading from Homer (or Tennyson) will inspire them with its tales of heroism. (It doesn’t occur to him that kids who grew up with Roy Rogers and Flash Gordon might not quite grasp the setting, or the ornate language of even the most dumbed-down translation of Homer.)
He doesn’t have to lie. Maybe in a different era it’s somehow not as big a deal, but I can state from experience that in 1963, there were dire consequences for kids caught lying even about relatively inconsequential matters.
Yet everyone else’s scenario (including yours) calls for young Allan to tell a lie that, if true, would result in an adult losing his job and being criminally prosecuted. It’s hard to think of too many lies a young person could tell that would get them in more serious trouble than this one would. Either that, or the coach actually does read from Joyce, which is utterly unlikely to ever happen in real life.
My point through all of this is that my interpretation works perfectly well in explaining all the events in “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” without resorting to anything in the least bit fantastical. No suspension of disbelief is required, no glossing over uncomfortable questions such as “How in the hell does the coach think that reading any passage from Joyce’s Ulysses, sexually themed or otherwise, will ensure his kids aren’t sissies?”
The rap on my version of the coach story (Homer as opposed to Joyce) is that “It’s not as funny as the notion of reading to 8- to 10-year-olds from a wildly age-inappropriate book” Apparently it’s just me, but I find that far more creepy than funny, and I’m happy to sacrifice that bit of humor — especially since, as I’ve shown, there’s no requirement that every sing line in the song has to be screamingly funny.
It’s also not true, as someone earlier said, that all humor depends upon incongruity. There is also humor that depends upon recognition of experiences, people, etc. that we’ve encountered in real life. This humor may sometimes be slightly exaggerated for effect, but it’s still very much reality-based. We nod our heads and laugh and say, “Yeah, I’ve been through that.”
And there’s also character-based humor. Think, for example, of a long-running and very successful sitcom that featured a loving and completely mentally healthy family and their experiences — none of which were experiences that never could have possibly happened in real life. There are plenty of other examples of this.
We laugh at young Allan because he’s portrayed in a situation we may be very able to relate to from our own youthful experiences…or (to use the second theory) simply because he’s such a nebbish. Nothing outlandish or divorced from all reality has to happen in the course of “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” for us to laugh.
Sherman wasn’t above rear end humor either:
Joyce would have approved.
I agree with everything you’ve said up to here, and I’m in the Joyce-Ulysses camp. I don’t buy the interpretation, offered above, that the complaints are a fabrication to get the parents to take the narrator home.
The first time one hears the song, when it should have its greatest comedic impact, one can’t posit a fabrication, because the complaints come before the plea to come home. The complaints are just a comic exaggeration of common camp-from-hell experiences. The narrator delivers them in an almost naive, matter-of-fact manner that suggests the opposite of calculation.
You hear the narrator, and you laugh at bad camp experiences, much like you read an Onion article and laugh at the exaggerated buffoonery of Joe Biden. Thinking of Onion-Biden as a carefully calculating poseur kind of spoils the fun.
Then, the narrator pleads to come home, in a comic exaggeration of camp homesickness. Then, he changes his mind, in a comic exaggeration of the mood swings which afflict kids away from home for the first time. No calculation, no deliberate lies, just a funny naive kid.
But here, we part company. The misguided coach tries to educate his charges into young adult heterosexuality by reading from a dirty book. The fact that the book is supremely inappropriate to the desired goal, being a rather turgid novel, only adds to the humor.
There is no “young Allan.” Allan Sherman was inspired to write the song based on letters received from HIS son, Robert, while away at camp (cite). If you look at it from that perspective, an adult using something his kid did/said as a source of humor for an adult audience, it is completely believable that he would throw in an outlandish claim like the coach reading from a risque book to keep the kids from turning gay.
He doesn’t change his mind because of a mood swing. In the first verse he says
“they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining”
and his change of heart comes from the rain stopping. He also isn’t a kid who hates the idea of camp - he seems very ready to go out and play baseball with the kids.
Also, it is more effective to build the argument for being allowed to come home before the actual plea. But that’s reading too much structure into the song.
But I agree on the most important point.
This is rendered obviously false by the fact that as soon as the weather changes, he decides that swimming in the lake he’s previously declared to be alligator-infested was a perfectly fine idea.
The formatting, rather than proving he’s not making stuff up, is necessary for the ‘take me home’ part to be funny - it’s a standard ‘setup->punchline’ format, even though the setup is funny in itself. ‘Take me home’ isn’t funny in itself, it’s funny because he’s just revealed why Little Allan has been talking about these things that range from the possible, but unlikely (food poisoning and missing campers) to the patently absurd (alligators and ‘dirty’ books). And makes them even more unlikely by mentioning the ridiculously short time span all of these disasters have been happening in - ‘I’ve been here One. Whole. Day.’
The fact that he moves on to attempted bribery just before the weather changes is further evidence of the fact that nothing after the weather, and possibly Joe Spivy’s poison ivy (though, as someone else mentioned, that doesn’t actually jibe very well with the bad weather), is true. He knows he can’t rely on the transparently false excuses to get his parents to bring him home, so he switches to promises to be good. If the camp really was the worst camp this side of Crystal Lake, realistically, he’d just insist that what he said was true, or in the case of the song, where that would be boring, Sherman would have filled that section with a couple more horrors that he was inexplicably going to overlook due to the fact that they’d be playing baseball when the bears ate them.
(Actually, the whole bit after the mention of bears would, realistically, work better in a conversation than a letter, but since phones for the campers everyday use aren’t exactly standard issue in summer camps, he was kind of stuck with the letter conceit.)
Someone who is not slowly typing on an iPad should turn this into a poll…
No lies, eh?
What about going hiking in the rain?
Well, remember- He’s been here one whole day. Other campers may have come, went hiking, gotten poison ivy (which is very believeable , might I add.) in the previous days or even weeks.
I don’t see how the camper lying has anything to with this, because I’ll say once again, there was no camper, no camp, no lies, no coach, no alligators. It’s all fiction, and…
IT’S A JOKE. ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT IT’S FUNNY.
And yet, screamingly funny the line is. Go on, give it another listen. If you’ve got a Laff-O-Meter, you MAY be able to disprove my claim that the line is in the top five of the laugh-getters on the record.*
Very few people are going to accept that this man, at the top of his game,did that by accident. Why, oh why, are you one of them?
*And just because I enjoy being difficult, I’ll require, in addition to your recorded results, the manufacturer, model number, serial number, maintenance logs, and notarized record of its most recent calibration.
Let me try one more angle. DChord568, while I disagree, I can actually understand why you prefer your explanation. It makes sense of a sort, it’s clean and kid-friendly, etc. That adds up.
But do you actually still think Allan Sherman was INTENDING that when he wrote it? A subtle blue joke in the song definitely seems like something he is prone to. He was notably interested in / concerned with American sexual morality, and released an entire book about that topic just a few years later.
Regardless of which interpretation you prefer, I think it’s awfully difficult to argue that the person who actually wrote the song, a 39-year-old professional comedian and entertainer with a demonstrable habit of using one-line slightly blue jokes and a known interest in 60s sexual morality, would awkwardly force a rhyme to make a barely-joke reference to a then-obscure poem or Homer’s poem. Especially as that isn’t the name “The Odyssey” most commonly goes by.
Your preferred interpretation is fine, but what flummoxes me in this thread is that you don’t seem to even acknowledge that the Joyce interpretation seems plausible. It really, really is.
I’ll save you the time 150-1