I like a couple of Boz Scaggs songs. One is “Jojo.” I’ve heard it lots of times. It gets stuck in my head a lot - but mainly the tune and the riffs and the drums. He isn’t the most intelligible singer, and I never really paid that much attention to the lyrics of this song. I got the parts about “Jojo digs those spinning lights, way out games and dizzy heights below him, Jojo digs those Broadway nights…” and “what do you think of gentlemen wearing mink…” I had a vague idea that it was about a gay person.
I heard the unedited album version for the first time last week, and with the “new” words I’d never heard before, I was dumbstruck! So I looked up the lyrics. For going on thirty years, I’ve been thrilled by the writing, chord changes, playing, production and sheen of a song about a pimp. A pimp who is “Gentle and soft, but who’d just as soon off you for looking the wrong way as not…”
I just happened to flip channels into WarGames at the point where David (Matthew Broderick) and Jennifer (the yummy Miss Ally Sheedy) have started playing Global Thermonuclear War on his PC. They’ve just launched subs, and about the first thing I heard him say is “blow 'em outta the water!”
Later, as the final big “battle” is about to begin, General Barringer (Barry Corbin) says almost exactly the same words. I actually giggled, and thought of this thread, as I had never connected the two lines before.
Not 100 times, but it took me at least 100 minutes to realize that getting the joke behind the name of the vaguely Jewish sorceror named As A Color the Shade Of Purple (or however you write that name, no longer have the book) in “The Flying Sorceror” by David Gerrold and Larry Niven hinged on realizing that “Color the Shade of Purple” was “Mauve.”
Or maybe they spelled it out for those as dense as me later in the book and I got it, can’t remember.
That book is a treasure trove of odd references. I got the “As-a-shade of purple Gray” thing pretty fast, especially because he laughs at his name being a bilingual pun (Asimov has at least one story hinging on a bilingual pun in “Asimov’s Mysteries”)
I footnoted my edition, But I’m sure I missed lots of references. One I didn’t learn until years later was that the god “Mouse-kwitz” was really SF historian Sam Moscowitz.
In Spaceballs, Barf enters the Princess’s Mercedes and introduces himself saying “I’m a mog. Half-man, half-dog. I’m my own best friend”. John Candy’s delivery and facial expression made me think the last sentence was just a throwaway funny line. I didn’t get it until a couple of days ago, after probably fifty or sixty viewings of the damn movie.
I understand that he’s Jewish - thank you. I just wondered if there’s something else to ‘get’. Just seems he’s like an old school Jewish entertainer, and to me, not a very entertaining one (I know this is mildly sacreligious here, and apologise…).