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Above: Sherman was always
attuned to childhood fears because
of his own experience with his
parents.
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Right: Allan Sherman "had a good
talent for wordplay, but he also had
something to say," says author Mark
Cohen.
Wonderful Wordplay
Parodies and puns have a reputa-
tion as the lowest form of humor, but
Cohen suggests that may be because
they're so often used as wordplay
for its own sake. Through the 1950s,
Sherman, who was then a TV game
show producer (he created I've Got
a Secret), entertained at parties with
parodies of current Broadway musi-
cals.
To "On the Street Where You Live
from the 1956 stage show My Fair
Lady, Sherman sang about the Jewish
move to the suburbs:
We've got Scarsdale men
We've got Great Neck men
And just lately we've been sneaking into
Darien,
Strange new noses there
Friends of Moses there
Near the goys on the streets where they
live
The show's composers, Alan Jay
Lerner and Frederick Loewe, were
Jews. And that was Sherman's larger
point.
"He wanted to address this disjunc-
tion between being Jewish and having
no Jewish content" Cohen says. "And
that's why he was, quote-unquote,
outing in the 1950s all the Jewish
songwriters and composers of the
Broadway stage by doing Jewish paro-
dies of their songs and saying, 'This is
what the songs would be like if Jews
wrote all the songs — which they do:"
And now it's time for camp:
Hello Muddah, hello Faddah,
Here I am at Camp Granada
Camp is very entertaining
and they say we'll have some fun if it
stops raining
It's downhill from there: alligators
in the lake, a rash of ptomaine poison-
ing, a bullying head coach who "wants
no sissies" and other horrors, which
Sherman sings in his rough tenor to
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the sprightly melody of Italian com-
poser Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance
of the Hours" The single garnered
Sherman the Grammy Award for com-
edy in 1964.
Describing the song as "part Perils
of Pauline and part Battle of Iwo
Jima," Cohen writes that Sherman
wove enough ambiguity into "Hello
Muddah" "that allows it to work for
their children and their parents"
"It introduces a cringe-worthy kind
of pathetic yearning of a child and
saves it at the last minute with humor;'
he says. "Those lines like, 'I promise I
will not make noise, or mess the house
with other boys' — anyone who has
children knows that when things go
bad, kids get like that. And it's heart-
breaking to hear that line and then
we're rescued at the last minute by 'I've
been here one whole day:"
There was nothing overtly Jewish
about the camper or Camp Granada.
But "Hello Muddah" reflected an expe-
rience widely shared by Jews at the
time, Cohen says.
"The Jews moved to the suburbs,
in per capita numbers not absolute
numbers, in greater numbers than the
American community at large. They
sent their children to summer camp
in much greater percentages than the
general community at large. These
were trends in American life that were
the most widely experienced by the
Jewish community:'
Sherman was the man of his
moment, Cohen says. "Being Jewish
gave him a perch from which to
observe American life, and it gave him
a darned good view of it:'
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