You’re excused. 
If you can find a copy of this book, I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down until you reach the end:
Sammy Davis Jr. singing the theme to Hawaii Five O
Alan Alda didn’t do many interviews back in the day.
I saw him on a rare appearance on the Tonight Show (Johnny Carson) when MAS*H was still running and it was surreal. Everything Alan said was perceived as a joke by the audience. When Johnny asked him about the theme song he said, that name of the song was “Suicide is Painless” and the audience just cracked the hell up.
Almost every line by Hawkeye Pierce was a flippant Groucho Marx type line, and so even in a serious interview the audience laughed at his every response. Weird.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
During the opening credits animation a little man pops out and actually sings a little bit of it (at 3:15),
but the entire song has lyerics:
http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/i/itsamadmadmadmadworld.shtml
In fact, the only way I know how many "Mad"s there are in the title is by remembering how the music goes.
That is wonderful in so many different ways.
I’d only ever heard Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 (which used to be frequently played at sporting events, until Glitter’s conviction on pedophilia), and it took a long time before I discovered that there’s actually a Rock and Roll Part 1, with lyrics!
In the spirit of NoClueBoy’s example:
I was an adult before I knew Taps had lyrics.
For those of you who aren’t already fans of Goldentusk’s YouTube videos, enjoy.
Bullshit. This 'sketches" vs “skits” thing is recent and just an attempt to make their work sound more serious.
noun
a short comedy sketch or piece of humorous writing, especially a parody:
a skit on daytime magazine programs
Thus SNl has ‘skits’.
Music to Watch Girls By, by The Bob Crewe Generation, is a great instrumental that later had words added; Andy Williams is among the singers who covered it. I’ve been aware of the instrumental version for most of my life; I’d never heard Andy’s version until a year or so ago (and I consider myself a pretty big Andy Williams fan – just somehow fell through the cracks).
Soulful Strut by Young-Holt Unlimited is, I think, more familiar to a lot of people (including me) than the very nice vocal version released a year or two earlier called Am I The Same Girl, by Barbara Acklin.
Read the book mentioned above. Lorne Michaels hates the word “skit.” He says it’s “something that kids do.”
In the five years of The Dick van Dyke Show, not once did I hear Rob, Buddy, or Sally use the word “skit.” It was always “sketch.”
Your argument would be a bit more persuasive if you could produce a quote from someone in the business (assuming you understand the phrase).
My mom had an amazing memory for lyrics, and I remembering shocked at her singing the lyrics when a Loony Tunes cartoon came on.
Whistling Like a Fool. I first learned them when I read a really well-written porn parody of the Andy Griffith show. (Google automatically includes the second click.)
I learned it as The Fishin’ Hole.
Offenbach’s “Can-Can” is actually the Infernal Galop from his operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld” and he wrote lyrics for it.
Denis Norden and Frank Muir, British comedy writers, once wrote their own lyrics for the Blue Danube:
If those count, the whole work of Catalan comedy trio La Trinca consists of putting lyrics to classical works. Warning: do not youtube if you value your classics.
How about Leave it to Beaver?
Yeah, that’s nice, *Lorne Micheals *doesn’t like the word. Convincing. :rolleyes:
I quote the fucking Oxford dictionary which is in “the business’… of what words mean. Not 'show business”. :rolleyes: