Put the lime in the coconut (and drink it all up)

Factual Questions
1

So I’m watching my copy of Reservoir Dogs and the end credits come up and this is the song that plays over them.

Coconut, by Harry Nilsson. Sounds a bit reggae, and I remember the song from when I was a kid. But, my questions are

  1. Is this a real cure for a bellyache? and
  2. Has anyone out there tried it?

I thought this was a factual question, which is why I put it in GQ, but if the mods feel it should be moved to Cafe Society, please feel free.

The song seems to imply that the girl put the lime and coconut together and that caused her bellyache, but the doctor says to put the lime and coconut together and drink it all up to relieve the bellyache.

Am I missing something here? (be polite… I just came back)

SFP

2

I vaguely remember it coming up before, and I don’t think anybody called it a good bellyache cure. However, my local paper runs The People’s Pharmacy, a column about folk cures and such. They said coconut and/or coconut milk can be an effective diarrhea cure.

3

You’re forgetting a key bit. She called and woke up the doctor with her trivial and self-inflicted ailment. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the advice may be slightly vindictive in nature.

4

Ah, a good point. Never thought of that. However,

According to Tom Hank’s character on Castaway, coconut milk causes diarrhea (things Gilligan’s Island never told us).

5

I just read through the lyrics, and paradoxically, putting the lime in the coconut and drinking bot’ up is what gave her the bellyache, and is also what the doctor is prescribing to cure it.

And it’s one chord, through the whole song.

So thinking that this song is anything but nonsense is probably not the best use of time.

6

Fermented coconut juice and hair of the dog?

7

I think it’s a Pete and Repeat joke, isn’t it? An aural recursion?

“Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell overboard. Who’s left?”

“Repeat.”

“Okay. Pete and Repeat went out in a boat…”

See also: The Song That Never Ends.
Don’t see: David Hasselhoff recursion.

8

Maybe he’s into homeopathy?

Perhaps she should put the lime in the coconut, dissolve them in 1,000,000 gallons of water, then drink it all up.

9

Nilsson was a massive alcoholic. The lyrics make sense if you add ‘and haff a fifth of rum’ in your head after each mention of “de lime in de coconut”.

What you then get is a song about a silly girl drunk dialling her doctor, who tells her the cure is keep drinking and call him in the morning.

I’m undecided whether the doctor means ‘if you would just please call me in the morning, I’ll tell you what to do’ or ‘I hoping you’ll get so wasted as to forget all about this in the morning, you silly drunken git’.

10

IMHO, it’s definitely about drinking. She says “Doctor, I’m hungover.” and he says “Get drunk again.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve been given this advice more than once by more than one person in my lifetime.

11

My apologies for forgetting this is GQ.

After some digging, it seems lime and coconut is a common Caribbean remedy for high blood pressure/hypertension:

  1. Shown under High Blood Pressure as a Caribbean Juice Pressure Reducer;

  2. Sylvester Ayer (a member of the first free slave village of Sligoville, Jamaica but made his home was in St. Catherine) states in his book Bush Doctor that it is a known remedy for hypertension; and

  3. A 1999 article, Blood Pressure in the Caribbean, states on page 8 that “[p]erhaps the most common and successful response to high blood pressure in Caribbean ethnomedicine has been treatment with native botanical resources. A long history of testing and experimentation by local herbalists has led to the discovery of several curatively efficacious plant derivatives [e.g., Halberstein (1983, 1997b) and Laguerre (1987, p. 162)]. The 14 species most widely cultivated and dispensed for high blood pressure, each representing a separate taxonomic family, are compiled in Table 4.”

But I** cannot find Table 4 **mentioned therein–help, please?

So, now the song seems to me to be about a girl who tried to help herself using a well known home remedy, only to have the doctor say ‘silly girl, you put de lime in de coconut…’

12

Heck, it’s my wife’s favorite hangover cure! It seems to work, too. Well, she won’t get “drunk” again, but while the thought of beer the next day disgusts me, drinking it seems to make her feel better.

13

My friend and I were big Nilsson fans in high school when this came out. Of course we ran out and got some coconuts and limes. The combination tasted pretty bad.