My Son, The Media Figure.
Although probably best known to modern audiences as the singer of "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp Granada)", Allan Sherman (born Allan Copelon, November 30, 1924 – November 20, 1973) was a prodigious talent who started working in the entertainment industry in the late 1940s and kept going strong until his death from emphysema at age 48.
Born in Chicago to two first-generation Jewish immigrants from Poland, he had a varied career encompassing music, scriptwriting, creating, producing and even acting (including a turn as the voice of the Cat in the Hat in the 1971 animated adaptation of the famous Dr. Seuss book, as well as Dr. Seuss On the Loose).
With Albert Hague, he cowrote the 1969 Broadway musical The Fig Leaves Are Falling
, which is notable for two things: the Broadway debut of David Cassidy (later of The Partridge Family), and closing after only four performances. He also guest-hosted The Tonight Show on several occasions, including the night Bill Cosby made his first appearance on the show; he would later be credited as co-producer on Cosby's first three albums for Warner (Bros.) Records.
He was also the author of several books, including the infamous comic novel The Rape of the A*P*E (American Puritan Ethic). He made his greatest impact on TV as creator of I've Got a Secret and as the producer of The Jackie Gleason Show, but it was his numerous albums of song parodies (starting with My Son, The Folk Singer in 1963) that made him a household name in the 1960s.
His son Robert, who inspired him to write "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", was a part of the Goodson-Todman game show staff.
A fair selection of his work can be found with a simple YouTube search.
Tropes present in Sherman's work:
- Anti-Christmas Song: A variation: "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas", which replaces the traditional calling birds, turtledoves, etc. with various schlocky items, including, among other things, a pair of teakwood shower clogs, an indoor plastic birdbath, and a Japanese transistor radio.
- Artistic License – Geography: In "America's a Nice Italian Name", the line "The opera house in Rome is called La Scala." La Scala is actually in Milan (they still call it La Scala in Rome, it's just not located there).
- Been There, Shaped History: "Good Advice" depicts him having a direct hand in numerous inventions (the elevator, the model T, the wheel!) and scientific discoveries (Benjamin Franklin harnessing electricity, Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity, Freudian psychology) by giving their creators, well, good advice. It gets subverted in the last verse, where he tells Christopher Columbus to sail west instead of east and sends him plummeting off the edge of the earth.Well, that was...
Bad advice! Bad advice!
Bad advice is just the same as good advice.
Everybody makes occasional mistakes,
And that was bad... ad... VICE! - Big Eater
- Mrs. Goldfarb, in "Grow Mrs. Goldfarb", especially this one line:
You had for breakfast two pounds bacon,
Three dozen eggs, one coffee cake, and
Then you had something really awful:
Four kippered herrings on a waffle,
Nine English muffins, one baked apple,
Boston cream pie, Philadelphia scrapple,
Seventeen bowls of Crispy Crunch,
Then you said, "What's for lunch?"- His spoken-word piece "Hail To Thee, Fat Person" is about how his mother turned him into one by telling him to "Clean [his] plate, because children are starving in Europe!"
"So I would clean the plate, four, five, six times a day, because somehow I felt that that would keep the children from starving in Europe. But I was wrong: they kept starving, and I got fat!" - Bowdlerise: The original 1963 single of "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas" had the "five gold rings" equivalent as "a statue of a naked lady with a clock where her stomach ought to be." But when it was included on For Swingin' Livers Only!, "naked" was edited out awkwardly. Even if you didn't know what the original lines were, you could easily tell that something had been cut for the album version. After mostly being unheard for decades (Dr. Demento almost always played the edited version and included it on his Christmas compilation albums), the unedited version, in stereo, showed up as a bonus track on My Son, The Box in 2005 (and Demento has played it every Christmas since).
- Brick Joke: In "The Ballad of Harry Lewis", "His name was Harry Lewis and he worked for Irving Roth...He died while cutting velvet" in the first verse just seems like a mildly amusing change to the lyrics of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" into something silly and mundane. But you get to the start of the second verse and realize it was the setup for an epic Pun.He was trampling through the warehouse
Where the drapes of Roth are stored Explanation - Disproportionate Retribution: Streets of Miami is about a lawyer getting into a gunfight to the death with his partner for criticizing his taste in hotels ("I'm going to the Fontainebleu. Pardner, it's moderner.").
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The two songs he recorded for Jubilee Records in 1951, credited as "Eln Shoyman": "A Satchel and a Seck" and "Jake's Song".note They're more overtly Jewish-themed than his later material, with a much smoother-voiced Sherman singing in a Yiddish accent and tossing in some Yiddish words as well.
- Ending Fatigue: "The End of a Symphony" has Allan complaining about classical music's tendency for drawn-out endings, demonstrating it by tacking the coda of Franz Schubert's 7th Symphony onto "Shave and a Haircut", the coda of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Overture to The Marriage of Figaro to "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" and the coda of Ludwig van Beethoven's 5th Symphony to "Yankee Doodle".
- Epistolary Novel: The song "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)" has the Framing Device of a kid writing a letter home to his parents about how terrible his summer camp is. By the end of the song he's changed his mind and says "Mother, Father, kindly disregard this letter."
- Funny X-Ray: "I See Bones" is all about this, including a list of all the unlikely things the doctor sees while looking at an X-ray of a patient's body.I see hips
And fourteen paper clips
Three asparagus tips
Among the lovely bones - Fun with Acronyms: Largely the point of "Harvey and Sheila".Harvey's a CPA.
He works for IBM.
He went to MIT and got his PhD.
Sheila's a girl I know,
At B.B.D.& O.
She works the PBX,
And makes out the checks. - Incredibly Lame Pun: The last line of "One Hippopotami":With someone you adore,
If you should find romance,
You'll pant, then pant once more
And that's! A! Pair! Of! PANTS!! - In the Style of: The title track of Peter and the Commissar has the commissars of music "improving" several classical tunes by setting them in hilariously inappropriate styles. They turn "Peter and the Wolf" into a bossa nova, Beethoven's Fifth into a cha-cha, Brahms' "Lullaby" into a rock-and-roll tune, "Swan Lake" into "Pete Tchaikovsky's Blues" and Verdi's "Aida" into a dixieland romp.
- Japanese Ranguage: Parodied at the end of "Lotsa Luck":When you buy a tape recorder of the automatic kind,
Lotsa luck, pal, lotsa luck.
If it's simplified for folks who aren't mechanically inclined,
Lotsa luck, pal, lotsa luck.
There's a small instruction booklet that's a hundred pages long,
And on page one, you get stuck.
It says, "If unsatisfactory,
You must bring this to the factory,"
But the factory's in Japan,
So rotsa ruck! - Jewish and Nerdy: In his heyday, his Nerd Glasses, crew cut and suits, combined with the often wonkish subject matter of his songs, easily put his artistic profile into this category.
- Jewish Smartass: While this wasn't the dominant part of his comedic persona, it was still one of the main components.From the intro to his Goldeneh Moments from Broadway set: "It occurred to me, what if all of the great hit songs from all of the great Broadway shows had actually been written by Jewish people?...Which they were."
- Key Under the Doormat: Mentioned by Queen Elizabeth in "Won't You Come Home, Disraeli":Now don't leave me flat,
The key to the palace is under the mat. - Know Your Vines: Just one of the many hazards of life in Camp Granada as described in "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp)":I went hiking with Joe Spivey
He developed poison ivy - Later-Installment Weirdness/New Sound Album: His last major album, 1967's Togetherness, is a straight studio recording without a studio audience, and featured on the cover a slim Sherman wearing contacts, looking quite different from the fat, glass wearing man of a few years prior. It also featured several parodies of very recent hits ("Westchester Hadassah" for "Winchester Cathedral", "Strange Things in My Soup" for "Stangers in the Night"), which he now had the greenlight to do from the Warner legal department, and a lot of them used musical arrangements that closely emulated the original hit versions, which Sherman didn't usually do. The previous year, he issued the single "Odd Ball"/"His Own Little Island", both serious songs, in an ill-fated attempt to position himself as a straight pop singer.
- Long List:
- "Shake Hands with your Uncle Max" and "Sarah Jackman" both have sections with obscenely long lists of relatives.
- "Hungarian Goulash #5" depicts goulash as containing meat from a long list of species, from mutton to kangaroo to soylent.
- Naturalized Name:
- His very first released parody, "Jake's Song" in 1951, is based around the notion that the title character of "Sam's Song" (a big hit for Bing Crosby and his son Gary in 1950) was actually a Jewish man named Jake who changed his name.
- "Seventy-Six Sol Cohens", one of his early Broadway parodies (of "Seventy-Six Trombones") has all of the Sols "change their name to Quinn."
- Nom de Mom: He was born Allan Copelon in 1924 to Percy Copelonnote and Rose Sherman, then found himself having to change his surname a few times among his mother's many divorces and remarriages as he was growing up. He chose to go by Sherman when he entered college, largely out of affection for his maternal grandparents (who he lived with at several points). Interestingly, he switched back to Copelon shortly after that, when he reconnected with his birth father (who was now a successful auto parts manufacturer), who promised to give Allan money for school if he changed his name back. But Percy Copelon never gave him the money, and in a Meaningful Rename situation Allan symbolically rejected his father by going back to Sherman once and for all. Sherman not being a specifically Jewish-coded name (though it had been her family's name in the old country) likely helped him reach a broader audience in his show business career.
- Puppy Love: I Can't Dance is about a pair of cute, awkward middle-schoolers falling in love at a school dance.
- Race Lift/ Setting Update: Many of his songs take old folk songs and update them to reflect the mid-20th century American (often specifically Jewish-American) experience.
- Self-Deprecation:
- A major part of his stage banter in live shows, His favorite running gag was that he actually used to look exactly like Cary Grant, but his handlers advised him to gain weight and wear glasses because it worked better for the image of a comedic singer.
- The closing lines of "An Average Song" admit that the song is "not too good".
- Song Parody: He began writing them in college, and became the first American pop singer to achieve mass success performing them. What's interesting is that he took several different approaches to parodies. A few just rewrote the originals into a different context ("Shake Hands with Your Uncle Max" is "Dear Old Donegal" switched from an idealized Irish to a modern American Jewish setting, including the "long list of names" section). Most others just completely subverted the originals. And there were also With Lyrics versions of familiar instrumental melodies (most famously "Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh!").
- Stepford Suburbia: "Here's to the Crabgrass".
- Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: As heard in his parody of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" in "Shticks and Stones":I'm Melvin Rose of Texas
And my friends all call me Tex
When I lived in old New Mexico
They used to call me Mex
When I lived in old Kentucky
They called me Old Kentuck
I was born in old Shamokin
Which is why they call me Melvin Rose- In "My Son The Vampire"When they see him, people scream and they yellAnd they scream and yell 'cause they're scared as heck...
- In "My Son The Vampire"
- Showdown at High Noon: His 1962 parody of "The Streets of Laredo", called "The Streets of Miami", feature two business partners shooting it out "in the heat of the sun at the stroke of high noon."
- "Sam crumbled, just like a piece halvah."
- Went to the Great X in the Sky: How "The Streets of Miami" ends: the Disproportionate Retribution above results in the gunman who killed his associate being forced to leave Miami, never to return, to avoid mob justice. He complains that New York is so cold that a person could die and winds up envying his murdered colleague, because "he's in that big Fontainebleu in the sky."
- With Lyrics: Sherman sometimes added lyrics to instrumental songs, a lot of them classical:
- My Son, The Nut featured "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah! (A Letter from Camp)", sung to Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours", and "Hungarian Goulash No. 5", sung to Johannes Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5".
- Allan in Wonderland features "Holiday for States", which lists the 50 states to the tune of David Rose's "Holiday for Strings", and "I Can't Dance", sung to Edvard Grieg's "Norwegian Dance No. 2"
