{"id":77,"date":"2011-02-25T15:51:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T15:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/?p=77"},"modified":"2011-03-20T18:34:25","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T18:34:25","slug":"hail-to-thee-fat-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/hail-to-thee-fat-person\/","title":{"rendered":"Hail to Thee Fat Person!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>Allan Sherman, of Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh fame, enjoyed an intense but brief popularity, releasing three albums in 1963 and then a rapid decline and premature death at age 49.\u00a0 But it is still easy to identify an Allan Sherman fan some 46 years later.\u00a0 I was standing in a buffet line with a medical colleague and a third person came up and said, \u201cI always appreciate a good pair \u2018o docs,\u201d and both of us the recited the complete stanza, \u201ca pair o\u2019 noia is just a bunch of mental blocks, and when Ben Casey meets Kildare, that\u2019s a \u2018pair o\u2019 docs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Allan Sherman was a staple of my childhood since my mother idolized his word play and parodies, a talent that was right smack in her wheelhouse as she routinely wrote similar songs for birthdays and other family events.\u00a0 An Allan Sherman biography notes that he started as a producer of the quiz show, \u201cI\u2019ve Got a Secret,\u201d which landed him in Hollywood where he entertained at parties, including his neighbor Harpo Marx, and ba-da-bing all of he suddenly had a record contract and became a bi-coastal toast of the town.\u00a0 Even as a ten year old, I knew something extraordinary was happening when my mother\u00a0 put on her heels and poppit faux pearls to go downtown<\/em> to a nightclub<\/em> to hear Allan Sherman perform.\u00a0 My parents never strayed from the comfy confines of their leafy suburb and rarely socialized with anybody beyond two or three degrees of separation.\u00a0 Who knows, there might have been some swingers<\/em> at a nightclub!\u00a0 Maybe my mother was a bit jealous of Allan Sherman, but probably more excited that this sort of clever talent was well appreciated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh apparently reached number 3 on the popular record charts, surpassing Elvis Presley and the early efforts of the Beatles.\u00a0 The song, which is set to the tune of a Ponchielli opera, recounts the misery of a child just arriving at a summer camp.\u00a0 \u201cI went hiking with Joe Spivey, he developed poison ivy. Do you remember Leonard Skinner, they\u2019re organizing a search party after dinner.\u201d\u00a0 It is hard to explain the popularity of this song \u2013 I certainly don\u2019t think that it was his best \u2013 but one commentator thinks that it touched on the universal themes of fitting in, and in fact, assimilation was a central theme in Allan Sherman\u2019s life.\u00a0 His early songs were mostly parodies on Jewish folk songs and culture.\u00a0 \u201cHava Nagila\u201d became \u201cHarvey and Sheila\u201d and Alouetta became \u201cAl \u2018n Yetta.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cFrere Jacques\u201d became Sarah Jockman and Jerry Bachman exchanging gossip (How\u2019s your cousin Shirley, well she got married early) and God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman turned into \u201cGod Rest You Jerry Mendelbaum.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, Allan Sherman expanded beyond Jewish folk tunes \u2013 there were send ups of suburbia (Here\u2019s to the Crabgrass), space travel and aliens (Six Foot Two, Solid Blue) and technology (Automation).\u00a0 He frequently poked fun at himself.\u00a0 In \u201cHail to Thee Fat Person\u201d Sherman explained that his rotund figure was essentially the result of the Marshall Plan \u2013 his mother constantly told him to clean his plate because there were people starving in Europe.\u00a0 In fact due to his efforts and those of other tubby patriots, \u201cwe kept this country out of war!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Allan also went were the where the original lyrics and his fervid imagination took him.\u00a0\u00a0The song \u201cYou Went the Wrong Way Old King Louie,\u201d was one of his better efforts, set to the tune of \u201cYou\u2019ve Come a Long Way From St. Louis.\u201d\u00a0 This song was one of our family favorites.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0You went the wrong way old King Louie, you made the population cry<\/p>\n

\u2018Cause all you did was sit and pet with Marie Antoinette at your place in Versailles.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Now we\u2019re gonna take you and the queen down to the guillotine somewhere in the heart of town.<\/p>\n

And when that fella\u2019s through with what he\u2019s going to do you\u2019ll have no place to wear your crown.<\/p>\n

\u00a0And now the country has gone kablooey -To King Louie was say fooey you disappointed all of France<\/p>\n

But what can you expect from a king who wears silk stockings and pink satin pants.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Allan Sherman was the master of the unexpected rhyme, which turned the lyrics from stupidly stupid to funnily stupid.\u00a0 As you listened to the song, you would hear the word France and know a rhyme was coming, and you might anticipate dance, chance or evey romance, but you would never expect that it could be pants.\u00a0 \u201cC\u2019est Si Bon,\u201d became \u201cI See Bones,\u201d about a radiologist who sang, \u201cI see things in your peritoneum that belong in the British Museum.\u201d\u00a0 I could picture Allan Sherman thumbing through his rhyming dictionary trying to find a rhyme for peritoneum.\u00a0 Presented with few choices, he figured out a way to work \u201cmuseum\u201d into the verse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Similarly, my mother had a pink rhyming dictionary always at the ready near the kitchen telephone.\u00a0 I think that her parodies peaked with a birthday song that she wrote for one of her friends with the improbable name of Hempie, who had just had a bout with jaundice after eating some bad sea food.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHempie you excite us when you talk of hepatitis,<\/p>\n

Your stool they had to study, since your eyeballs were so cruddy\u201d<\/p>\n

She was so taken with the excite us\/hepatitis doublet that she used it almost annually as she serenaded Hempie.<\/p>\n

\u201cHempie you no longer can excite us since you don\u2019t<\/em> have hepatitis<\/p>\n

When your eyeballs stopped being yellow, you became a mellow fellow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sherman also wrote entirely new music which set him free from the limitations of a parody.\u00a0 I think that his tour de force was \u201cGood Advice\u201d a song running about as long as Don McLean\u2019s American Pie, where he provided advice to the great inventors throughout history.\u00a0 Sherman encouraged Ben Franklin to go fly a kite even though it was raining, he told Isaac Newton to go take a nap under the apple tree to avoid getting sunburned, he pointed out to Otis that his moving box would work better if it went up and down instead of from side to side.\u00a0 He gave his best piece of advice to the caveman Ooga MaGook who was uncertain what to do with his big square stone with a hole in the middle.\u00a0 \u201cRound off those corners, and Ooogie Baby, you\u2019ve got the wheel!\u201d\u00a0 He would finish each verse with a two liner praising the advice \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m so worldly wise, I deserve a Nobel prize,\u201d or \u201cHarvard offered me a phi beta kappa key.\u201d\u00a0 I routinely use one of these lines as a staple of birthday songs that I have written – \u201cThe world is a better place since you joined the human race.\u201d\u00a0 (My other favorite line was written by my friend Sallie, \u201cYou are so very kind, you\u2019d give your eyeballs to the blind.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u00a0After poking around the internet, I found a YouTube video of Allan Sherman singing, which made more sense of the theme of assimilation.\u00a0 Allan was singing with Dean Martin and Vic Damone, two of the coolest cats of the mid 1960s.\u00a0 You sensed that Allan thought that he was finally part of the Hollywood elite, but it also looked like he was just trying a bit too hard, and that it just wasn\u2019t going to happen.\u00a0 Dean and Vic looked donair and elegant in their tuxedos, and the short, fat, Sherman with a buzz cut and heavy black glasses just looked out of place. The two men also had beautiful voices, and even though Allan sang on key, he really was not a great singer.\u00a0 Sherman was eagerly grinning at his songs and glancing over at Dean and Vic, asking for approval.\u00a0 Although Dean and Vic were smiling, it really looked more like they were laughing at him.\u00a0 I think that Allan had failed to see the distinction between being part of the elite crowd and a buffoonish mascot, easily disposable.\u00a0 Check out the video below.<\/p>\n

\u00a0http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2vR9cT6Jyg4<\/a><\/p>\n

After his initial three top selling albums, his songs became more pointed and bitter, perhaps because he found that the success he so coveted was actually hollow.\u00a0 The Kennedy assassination soured the country\u2019s mood as well.\u00a0 He slipped into obscurity and found himself reduced to writing jingles for television commercials.\u00a0 If Allan Sherman didn\u2019t write it, he most certainly inspired the Burger King song from the 1970s:<\/p>\n

\u201cHold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don\u2019t upset us.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

All we ask is that you let us do it your way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e.\u00a0like post, stop, spot) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.\u00a0 One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following line.\u00a0 Your job is to figure out the words based on the context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for answers.\u00a0<\/h6>\n

After Word War II, food was scarce and Europeans were starving and thin,<\/p>\n

\u00a0That\u2019s when Allan Sherman says his weight problems began to —–.<\/p>\n

His mother said, \u201cpeople are starving so you must clean your plate,<\/p>\n

So he started to —– on pies and sweets and generally overate.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This was the message of the Marshall plan that he could not ignore<\/p>\n

He was told that —–fat is what keeps this country out of war!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Answers:\u00a0 begin, binge, being<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allan Sherman, of Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh fame, enjoyed an intense but brief popularity, releasing three albums in 1963 and then a rapid decline and premature death at age 49.\u00a0 But it is still easy to identify an Allan Sherman … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-1f","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}