Song Review: Allan Sherman, "Hello Mudduh, Hello Faddah"

   I mean, were people back in the ‘60s out of their minds, or…?

   The other day, I came across this video of a guy named Allan Sherman singing a song on some old black-and-white variety show, might’ve been his show, but it was posted by a YouTube channel called “Allan Sherman’s Nutty Parody Channel.” This guy was apparently a huge influence on “Weird” Al Yankovic, and with the lyrical content of the song in question, I guess I can see the resemblance. Key difference is, Yankovic’s songs are usually a direct parody of something, either in lyrical content or musically. But this, well, this is like someone getting halfway there and then skidding the rest of the way down the highway, fucked up on some of that good dope.

   The premise of this song is, there’s a kid at a camp called Granada. Lord knows when I first heard “Granada” in the lyrics, I thought about the War in Grenada, even though that hadn’t even happened yet. The melody is taken from this opera piece called “Dance of the Hours” by Amilcare Ponchielli. That song is supposedly about the eternal struggle between good and evil. I’d argue that, whatever the subject of the song is, it’s got greater depth than this song’s subject, which is a kid writing a letter to his parents about camp:

“Hello mudduh, hello faddah
Here I am at Camp Granada
Camp is very entertaining
and they say we’ll have some fun when it stops raining”

   That’s the punchline of the verse, right there. Camp is not fun because of, uh, rain. Hardy-har. What, was this record given out free with the purchase of a hamburger? Allan Sherman said he wrote this song based off of the experiences his own son had at summer camp. The kid in question wound up getting kicked out of the camp, which would have been a shitload of a lot funnier to hear about than the stuff in this song. And as for the “mudduh, faddah” shit, that’s because Sherman’s Jewish, apparently. I guess it’s an accent thing.

The song continues with:

“I went hiking with Joe Spivey
He developed poison ivy
You remember Leonard Skinner
He got Ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner”

   I actually had to look up ptomaine poisoning because of this song, so never let it be said that novelty pop music never taught anybody anything. Ptomaine is an obsolete medical term describing the alkaloids that were thought to be formed in the carcasses of decayed animals. Now that we know that food poisoning is caused by bacteria and not “ptomaine,” the phrase has fallen out of use. The point is, this Leonard kid was apparently fed rotten food, and that’s a comforting fucking thing to hear in a novelty song for kids, isn’t it? Yuck it up, Junior, the kid’s shitting his guts out and may be pushing up daisies inside of a week!

   Like, okay, poison ivy is one thing. That happens, sometimes you can’t really avoid it, and I doubt it’s ever fatal unless some kind of allergy is involved. But that other kid was straight up fed an animal carcass some counselor peeled off a nearby highway! Leonard probably thought the maggots were fucking macaroni! If you’re a parent and you get a letter from your kid with this shit in it, you don’t write a song based off of an old opera number, you call the goddamned cops THEN you start writing the song! By the way, “Leonard Skinner,” that sounds a lot like “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” My mother once told me that the band Lynyrd Skynyrd named themselves after a P.E. coach they had who was named Leonard Skinner, and I’m too lazy to bother looking up that name to see if my mom just got her stories mixed up.

“All the counsellors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses”

   James Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel about a guy wandering around in Dublin for a day, running errands and shit. I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it’s vulgar (for the time) but also really good. However, if I were going to read kids a James Joyce novel, I’d be more inclined to pick the confusing shit-spew “Finnegans Wake,” just to keep them on their toes. That novel’s probably the literary equivalent of food poisoning. Anyway, alligators, the lake the kids are presumably supposed to swim in has fucking alligators in it, and this is apparently a punchline to a comedy bit as opposed to a cause for alarm. Is this Florida? Did Leonard Skinner get “ptomaine poisoning” from eating a poorly-cooked alligator tail?

   For a song that’s supposed to be comedic, there sure are a lot of… no jokes whatsoever in here. I mean, I get it, it’s funny because the kid’s probably exaggerating, but seriously, the parents in this song read this shit and thought, “ha! Let’s get out the Ponchielli 78s and tear out a pop hit about this!” Either this kid is the biggest liar in the tri-state area, or these are the worst parents in the same tri-state area. Either way, some group of assholes in the tri-state area just got outdone. Check and mate, Allan.

   Finally, “waiters?” Did summer camps back in the 60s take place at five-star restaurants? What happened to the old, hairy bastard behind the lunch counter tossing sloppy joes to and fro, willy nilly? I guess that dude didn’t get hired on ‘til later, but these are apparently actual waiters, according to a cursory Google search. I can’t wrap my head around that, having never been to summer camp myself (well, okay, besides Bible camp, but I refuse to count that shit). I always pictured summer camp food to be something slung by cafeteria chefs. Maybe it depends on what kind of camp you can afford to go to. Some of them might even have massages while you eat.

“Now I don't want this should scare ya'
But my bunkmate has Malaria
You remember Jeffery Hardy
They're about to organize a searching party”

   Holy shit, the body count at this place is really starting to rack up. Is this Camp Crystal Lake, what the fuck is going on? Every time this kid starts a sentence with the phrase “you remember…”, it ends with someone dead. The parents need to check the return address on this letter and make sure it isn’t being sent from the mortuary they accidentally delivered the kid to. I’ve never seen so many dead kids in a song that’s supposed to be funny.

   Let’s start off with the malaria thing. It isn’t a contagious disease, but the fact is this kid shouldn’t be at a summer camp, he should probably be in ICU. Did he have the malaria when he got to the camp, or did he get it from something AT the camp? I think we’re supposed to infer the latter, but somehow I don’t think a camp that poisons its kids and lets them get lost in the fucking woods is going to have the highest of admission standards. Then again, maybe my brain is trying to shut down at the idea of somebody finding a novelty song about some kid contracting malaria at summer camp just hi-larious. “Christmas Shoes” is less morose than this shit.

   Also, a kid is missing. A kid has straight fucking disappeared. They’re gonna probably find an alligator holding the kid’s leg in its mouth like a joint in a few days, if they find any trace of him. I’m sure a kid disappearing at a summer camp has happened before, in fact, I bet it happens all the time. But when it happens at the same camp that features alligators, food poisoning, and goddamned malaria, it’s not a tragedy, it’s gross negligence. Are the counselors too busy routinely getting into fights with the waiters to make sure all the kids are safe in their bunks? Let’s hope Jeffrey’s surname turns out to be accurate, because he’s going to need all the hardiness he can get to survive the next few weeks.

   Now, look, I’m not a hand-wringing moralist when it comes to child endangerment as a source of comedy. I laughed my ass off at jokes about a zipline created by goons on the Something Awful forums that was insanely dangerous and led to a bunch of ribbing from other subforums about how many kids it would probably kill. The difference is, those were jokes. They had setups, and punchlines, and weren’t just variations of “hey, remember John Skizzle? He’s dead now. I wanna go home.” Did communism just destroy the American brain during this time period or what? I guess inevitable nuclear annihilation made a few kids dying at a summer camp seem a trifle in comparison.

“Take me home, oh Muddah, Faddah
Take me home, I hate Grenada
Don't leave me out in the forest where
I might get eaten by a bear”

   Wait a minute. Is this kid not letting us in on the whole story about Jeffrey Hardy? There are alligators in the lake, why wouldn’t he just assume Jeff had been eaten by one of those unless he, in fact, saw him eaten by a bear instead? I think this little shit knows more than he’s saying he does. Maybe he’s being blackmailed by one of the counselors. Yeah, I bet Jeff’s death had nothing to do with a bear or a goddamn alligator! He probably got caught in the crossfire during a gun fight between the waiters and counselors and a counselor buried him out in the middle of nowhere, only for our protagonist to stumble across it. Either this is a coded message begging his parents for help (which, good work if it is, because holy shit) or this kid’s choosing to help the murderous counselor establish an alibi. What are they offering you, kid??

“Take me home, I promise I will
Not make noise, or mess the house with
Other boys, oh please don't make me stay
I've been here one whole day”

   Wow, fuck, talk about a “wham line,” this shit has all happened over the course of a single day? I guess that kid who had malaria must’ve brought it in with him. I guess that must be a relief to everybody, including his parents, who probably aren’t coming back for him. They must’ve had “gas station” as a back-up plan on their list of places to dump their sick kid. But wait, that means the kid who disappeared hasn’t even been gone that long! I wonder if his body has even grown cold yet under the dark, rain-engorged earth he was hastily buried in.

“Dearest Fadduh, Darling Muddah
How's my precious little bruddah
Let me come home if you miss me
I would even let Aunt Bertha hug and kiss me”

   A lot of ‘60s humor, and really, decades before and after it, was at the expense of aunts and mothers-in-law. I remember watching lots of old Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a boy that featured jokes about the ugly, booring, annoying, unpleasant mother-in-law, occasionally aunt. But the part of it I really marvel at is “Bertha.” Like, is there a name on earth that is more connoted with a fat woman than Bertha? Has there ever been a skinny woman with that name? Is it court mandated that a baby girl who’s born at a certain weight has to be named Bertha or Helga or something? Like, if you’re a woman who is named Bertha, you might as well be named “Fatty McFatterson,” even if you are thin, which I doubt.

“Wait a minute, it's stopped hailing
Guys are swimming, guys are sailing
Playing baseball, gee that's bettah
Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter”

   Okay. This is the last verse of the song, and the whole punchline is, I guess, now that the summer camp is actually fun, the kid likes it. That would make sense, if the crux of the kid’s earlier argument for the shittiness of the camp rested on it being boring instead of lethal. I’m picturing this kid laying on the bottom bunk with his bunkmate laying dead on top, looking out the window and seeing kids playing in the no longer rainy weather, putting away his stationary and rushing out to greet the day… only to come back, put the letter in an envelope, and mail it even though he wants his parents to disregard the fucking thing.

   Like, seriously, kid? Why not just rewrite it? You really think your parents are gonna ignore the malaria and alligators and dead kid when they make it to the end of your letter just because you ask them to? Shit, I guess yours might, but most wouldn’t. Like, this punchline would make sense if the song was taking place during a phone call, but you don’t just write “ignore all but the end of this” at the end of your letter and send the fucking thing off anyway. That’s like writing an entire novel without using the backspace button, then sending it off to be published. Also, I hope this kid doesn’t have too much trouble hitting a homer while flashes of Leonard Skinner shitting and puking blood invade his mind every time he blinks.

   In conclusion: If we call Weird Al “Weird,” we need to call this guy “Infanticidal” Allan Sherman.