In his song about Hubert Humphrey Lehrer has the following lines:
“We must protest this treatment, Hubert”
Says each newspaper reader
As someone once remarked to Schubert
“Take us to your leader.”
So my question is, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Obviously “Schubert” is one of the few things to rhyme with “Hubert” (although I expect better from a guy who can rhyme “Bauhaus” with “chow house” and “murder” with “Das Lied von der Erde”) but “take us to your leader”? Is that just a rather weak jab at LBJ for supposedly ignoring him or is there something else going on?
OK, so it’s “take us to your song”? Is it just the pun he’s going for, based on the supposed snubbing of Humphrey by LBJ, or is thre something more to it?
I can’t recall the rest of the song’s lyrics, but I think it is a pun on lieder/leader, with “Take me to your lieder” referring to Schubert, and “Take me to your leader”, the Hump. After all, Humphrey was a VP once, so his “leader” would have been LBJ, no?
All I remember about that time was that “Take me to your leader” was a cliché used as the first thing an alien would say to the first human they met after landing on the Earth. Its relevance to Humphrey is stretched, thus the apology.
Ah-ha… thanks, pinkfreud, I was only 7 years old at the time and my polictical knowledge was limited at that time to watching Saturday morning episodes of Super President.
I think the apology was for the bad pun, actually.
I’ll search my complete New Yorker cartoons CD for the first reference there (there must be one.)
I remember a cartoon, kind of like joke 2, with an alien saying it to a fire hydrant. I’m sure it predated the cartoon, being much earler than when you could use the word gynecologist in a cartoon.
And it all reminds me of this Lehrer intro
“The heartwarming story of the necrophiliac who fulfilled his boyhood dream and grew up to be coroner.”
<mild laughs>
“the rest of you can look it up when you get home.”
[nitpick]“to your songs” actually—“Lieder” is plural.[/nitpick] (And, at least when used by an English-speaking person, it refers to a specific type of song most famously composed by Schubert. A search on Amazon.com for Schubert Lieder yields hundreds of results.)
Doesn’t look like there’s anything more to it than the pun and the rhyme, unless there’s something we’re missing from the larger context.
“Take me to your leader” gags were popular in the '60s. I recall a cartoon from the period: Flying saucer grounded in background, three diminutive antennaed ET’s talking to a guy in a suit. Caption: “He’s at his ranch, and damned if I’m taking you all the way to Texas!”
Hey, that would work now . . . if TMTYL gags were not so passe as to be quaint . . .
