It was “good king Windowslats”, not “sauerkraut”
First, it’s the custom here to give a link to the column being discussed. Just for future reference. Guests are always welcome.
I assume that the column referred to is What are the lyrics to Walt Kelly’s classic carol, “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie”?
At the bottom, Cecil writes:
Was there ever a Good King Windowslats version? Nothing comes up via Google. Kelly did like to play with his parodies, which is how Boston Charlie grew to six verses, but this doesn’t ring any bells with me. What’s your source?
And to really nitpick, even Cecil gets the original wrong. Here’s how it goes from the very first Pogo compilation:
Churchy [singing]: “Good King Sourkraut looked out on his feets uneven!”
Pogo: Whoa! Wenceslas is king – Wenceslas! Wenceslas!"
Churchy: “Man! Hear that? Winklehof is king! Good King Sour Kraut must be dead!”
Some time ago I had been looking for a full verse, but all I found was a version that matched Cecil’s and continued, “Wenceslaw [or maybe Wenceslas] lay round about, nine an’ ten, eleven.”
That means Kelly did more than one version and Cecil was right. Of course. 
With your name, it figures you’d show up here.
I never got what was so funny about that stuff. But every year at this time, dozens of message board people have to quote that whole “Walla Walla” thing in huge-ass sig files, and it’s just a bunch of gibberish non-sequiturs that occasionally rhyme. Can someone explain the humor, or why Kelly is considered a “genius” for it?
Lou, when you have to explain humor, it’s no longer funny. Kelly was a genius for his brilliant art work through the cartoon media, and his biting political satire. Satirizing Christmas Carols was not done in the 40s and 50s, he was a groundbreaker. And, he’s not just using nonsense words, he’s using real words (mostly) – at least in the first version: Walla Walla, Wash(ington) is a real city, as is Kalamazoo. “Nora’s freezing on the trolley” is scarcely gibberish. The song borders on the edge of making sense, like Lewis Carroll’s great parodies.
Kelly was also satirizing people who don’t know the words to a song but think they do, or sing anyway – the reason there are so many versions of “Deck us all” is that some character, like the hound dog Beauregard, would interrupt to say, “You’re singing it wrong,” and give us “Bark us all bow-wows of of folly.” There’ve been several threads here about “misheard” song lyrics.
If you don’t think it’s funny, then you don’t. I never understood the one about soap and radio, for instance.
Kelly also did several versions of “Twelve Days of Crispness,” of which my favorite verses were “three wench friends” and the concluding verse, “and a parsnip in a psaltry.”
Pogo isn’t a series of one-liners complete in each strip, as comics are today. Pogo is an entire world that you inhabit, with characters whose personalities are part of their humor. Each of them approaches reality in a different way, with Pogo himself the anchor to our perceptions.
Dex has the satire of the carols right. The words change from iteration to iteration, both because it was funnier that way and because the characters themselves changed over time. They insisted that their current version was the one and only correct one, even if that contradicted their past behaviors.
It’s just like a message board in that way. 
I’m looking at my copy($1.25) of Deck Us All with Boston Charlie, paperback, 1955(I have the 1963 version). On the cover is says “Here are several explanations of the origin of the carol that lurks behind the title of this book…each of them equally authentic.”
On the inside, Walt says “Meanwhile, the search goes on in this book for the meaning and origins of “Deck Us All…” Here we have several “latest” words on the subject and no last word at all…”
Og bless us every one.
Hmm? 1963 was the first printing for that title. It does have earlier copyrights inside, for the reprinted material, but it also includes strips from the early 60s as well as a new tale, presumably from 1963. It couldn’t have come out first in 1955, unless it was awfully thin at the time. :dubious:
Then I just misread it as earlier versions. You always win in the book department.
That’s only because I have the superior throw weight in kilobooks.
You might be surprised…
“This means war! … Go, and never darken my towels again!”
Kelly was know to rearrange wording a lot. His favorite gag was to show Pogo’s boat from five angles, with five different names on the four sides.
Since the Walla Walla song was printed in many different strips, with various numbers of stanzas, it too has variations of wording.
Isn’t that from David Sedaris?
[Breaks down sobbing]It’s from Duck Soup.[/sobbing hysterically]
Somehow I missed that one. It’s great!
You could be right, and this is obviously a nitpick to non-Pogo fans, but onceuponatime I looked at a large quantity of Pogo-characters-in-a-swampboat strips, and never found more than four different sides of a boat in a single strip.
Besides, that would have had to have been a Sunday strip, as daily strips only had 4 panels max anyway.
A while back, and in a source which I am unable to look up or verify (via a Google search, at least), I read that a lot of the language in the first verse of “Boston Charlie” was a reference to jail life. A “Charlie” was a jail guard, “the trolley” was the system of passing messages in between cells, “Nora” was the name given to your jailhouse sweetheart, and that Walla Walla and Kalamazoo both housed their county’s jail. Something to do with Kelly’s being very interested in prison reform, and wanting to send a message to the guys “inside” that they were not forgotten.
Anyone else got something along those lines?
A further point to be made here is that this kind of thing is hard. Most people, attempting it, are lucky if they can produce something on the order of the “Booger Song” from Ozy and Millie. (That’s not a knock at O&M – the in-story composer of the “Booger Song” is little more than a toddler.)