I just did the fact-checking for a talk I’m delivering on Wednesday. Yeah, I’m an idiot (like we didn’t all already know that). When I jotted it on my list, I managed to overlook the holiday weekend, and this weekend Turnwed out to be a doozy.
Actually, there wasn’t much to check, anyway. It should have been a 15-minute job, using only my own citation database. Except for one fact:
I need the name of a certain 1950s psychiatrist who released several successful comedy albums. He discussed enough psychiatry that he may have been considered that era’s equivalent of what we later called a “self-help shrink”. (The popular works of many “pop psychologists” and motivational speakers were really mostly entertainment, even if they were technically skilled and qualified.)
I only know of him from a single album I found in a library when I was a child in the 1970s. I believe his name was Alan Sherman, but I’m more certain of the “Alan” than the “Sherman”, and not entirely certain of either name. Alan Sherman was, IIRC, a comedian/songwriter in the 1950s, perhaps best remembered for “Hello Mudda/ Hello Fadda/ Here I am at Camp Grenada,” but unfortunately my brain is stuck on that name right now.
Unlike most “obscure” facts from the 1950s that I learned as a child, I never heard any mention of him, once I was old enough to have a proper historical perspective on the culture of the decades just before I was born. He may not have been as significant or popular as his album cover publicity claimed.
Two of his lecture-cum-comedy routines stick in my mind. One addressed the 1950s popular concept of a “nervous breakdown” (“There is no such thing. SHow me the nerve that broke down”), and sounded like it had been the schtick that thrust him to fame in an earlier album. The other was a routine on “catatonia”, a complete paralysis that permanently confined millions to “psychiatric asylums” in the 1950s . (It was believed to be a psychogenic paralysis , but 10-15 years later, Dr. Oliver Sacks showed that these people were “trapped in their bodies” by a physical disease, “end stage Parkinsonism” (see the book/movie “Awakenings”)
If anyone can point me at the correct name, I’ll happily research the rest. I’ve often thought of citing him (and the then-current misinterpretations revealed in his routines) in my professional career, but I’ve always resorted to more scientific, more easily researched citations. For this talk, a psychiatrist-comedian would actually have more impact than a study or prominent researcher.
