Vol. 118: Going viral, before the Internet

The infectious pleasure of forbidden fruit

I attended my first opera in 1957, when my parents took me to a performance of Carmen at the Met. I was 14 at the time and Bizet’s warhorse was 82, but I was already familiar with one aria, thanks not to records but to an underground version of the famous “Toreador Song” that had been passed down by generations of kids since long before I was born, to wit:

Toreador-ah,
Don’t spit on the floor.
Use the cuspidor;
That’s what it’s for.

This nonsensical doggerel had persisted long after cuspidors themselves— those spittoons that were once standard equipment in every office— had vanished, say around 1930. The flu epidemic of 1918 fostered the realization that spitting contributed to the spread of tuberculosis, so the once-popular male addiction to chewing tobacco was replaced by a presumably healthier tobacco habit: smoking cigarettes.

But the cuspidor song survived. It was the same rhyming verse that my father and his fellow Penn undergrads belted out in the mid-1930s when, having been recruited as non-singing supernumeraries for a traveling Metropolitan Opera performance of Carmen at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, they gleefully defied the director’s strict imprecation against their singing anything.

What Clark Gable told Vivien Leigh

Nowadays, when we say something “went viral,” we refer to an Internet post that’s immediately transmitted electronically around the world. But how explain the global circulation of a ridiculous song that was composed long before the Internet and was never performed or recorded in public (at least not until Bart Simpson sang his version on “The Simpsons” in 2018)?

To me, the explanation lies in the infectious nature of rhythm and rhyme. In the Middle Ages, illiterate peasants relied on jingles and limericks to convey and store useful information (e.g., “A stitch in time/Saves nine.”). By the time I came along in 1942, pretty much everyone could read, but these alternative ditties persisted, if only to serve the eternal need of rebellious kids to stick it to their elders, and especially the need of adolescent wise guys to shock their prissy girlfriends.

(Before the counterculture ’60s arrived, a solid line separated what could be said in public and in private, and especially in the presence of ladies. Remember how shocked everyone was when Clark Gable concluded Gone with the Wind by telling Vivien Leigh, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”? After nearly four hours in a theater seat, I didn’t give a damn, either. But in 1939 I would have expressed my complaint differently in public.)

Gounod’s kangaroo

Less popular than Bizet’s “Toreador Song” but no less absurd was the dissident version of the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from Gounod’s 1859 opera Faust. In conventional circles, this chorus was and still remains a rousing macho anthem, popular among dictators and their disciples: The soldiers proclaim their loyalty to their country and their readiness to defend it at any cost. Call it the French equivalent of “Rule, Britannia.” (If the melody escapes you, click here.)

It took pimple-faced twerps like me to bring the “Soldiers’ Chorus” down to Earth— where, you could argue, it belonged:

My father murdered a kangaroo.
Gave me the gristly end to chew.
Wasn’t that a terrible thing to do?
To give me the end— the gristly end—
Of a dead kangaroo!

See how easily it rolls off the tongue?

Hitler’s private parts

I was only three when World War II ended in 1945, yet for years thereafter I heard kids repeating clandestine songs that sprang from the Hitler era, like this alleged Nazi version of “America”:

My country, ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of Germany.
My name is Fritz.
My father was a spy
Shot by the FBI.
His name will never die:
His name was Fritz.

These lyrics were unlikely to threaten the status of Cole Porter or Ira Gershwin, yet they endured among kids precisely because they were both so silly and so easy to sing and repeat.

Here’s another subversive spinoff from the Hitler era, this to the tune of “Whistle While You Work,” from Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937):

Whistle while you work,
Hitler is a jerk.
Mussolini bit his peeny
Now it doesn’t work.

Another song from Snow White— the Seven Dwarves’ work song— was notable for its lack of imagination: Its opening lines— “Hi ho, hi-ho/ It’s off to work we go”—were followed by no lyrics, just two lines’ worth of whistling. It was left to my prepubescent contemporaries to remedy that deficiency:

Hi-ho, hi-ho,
We’re off to the burlesque show.
I’ll pay two bits to see two tits.
Hi-ho, hi-ho!

Goring’s injured groin

Underground songs rarely spilled over into the mainstream. One exception was the “Colonel Bogey March,” composed by a British bandmaster in 1914 and familiar to most of us today as the tune whistled by British troops in the Bridge on the River Kwai

(1957). During World War II it became a popular song, inspired by the news that the Luftwaffe commander Herman Goring had suffered a groin injury. “Goring has only got one ball” soon segued into the version I heard as a kid in the ’50s:

Hitler has only got one ball.
Goring has two but they are small.
Himmler has something similar
And Goebbels has no balls at all.

But was it ever publicly performed in Britain, even during the war? Not likely.

When the moon hits your eye like…

Undercover songs continued in the postwar era as a much-needed sane antidote to sentimental ballads like “Vaya Con Dios,” “Ebb Tide,” and “Oh My Papa,” which seemingly begged to be lampooned. In the hands of my sixth-grade classmate Bernie Wasserman, the Ames Brothers’ mushy “You, You, You” became “Me me, me/I’m in love with me me me.”

But damn near any hummable tune was fair game for adolescent male improvement. Dean Martin’s silky-voiced 1953 hit, That’s Amore, may have been cherished by generations

of schmaltzy Italians, who sang it at weddings and even funerals. Decades later, it accompanied the opening credits in Cher’s 1987 comeback romantic comedy, Moonstruck. But to the kids in my West Side Manhattan neighborhood, that mawkish eyewash about “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” pleaded for a takedown. Something like:

When a rock hits your cock
And you don’t wear a jock,
That’s a rupture.

Sneaking past the censors

The birth of rock ’n roll in 1955— not coincidentally, the year my rebellious age cohort became teenagers— marked the beginning of the end of covert music. This new musical genre, unlike its romantic predecessors, was deliberately conceived to annoy the hell out of our parents. Subtle nuance and double entendres were out, as in Bill Haley’s “Dim, Dim the Lights,” released in 1955:

Oh, what a crazy party, all the gang is here too.
The beat is really jumping like a kangaroo.
I’m full of cherry soda and potato chips,
But now I want to get a taste of your sweet lips.

In effect, the tasty forbidden fruit that previously circulated among kids was no longer forbidden and consequently less tasty. The best any rebel could hope for in the rock ’n roll age was some really salacious sound sneaked past the censors into the background music. “Quarter to Three,” by Gary U.S. Bonds (1960), opened with the allegedly raucous noise of a late-night party. Amid the cacophony, a male voice supposedly could be heard saying, “Open your legs a little wider, baby.” At least that was the urban legend. I frankly never discerned it, but maybe your ears are better than mine. (Click here.)

And today we live by the Internet, where nothing is forbidden. So now I kindle my creative juices as a gonzo songwriter, updating national anthems, college fight songs, Protestant hymns, and political jingles for clients who don’t always hang around long enough to pay me. Here, for example, is the new national anthem of Iraq that I was commissioned to compose more than 20 years ago (tune: “America”):

Don’t knock Saddam Hussein
And his demented brain.
He’s all we’ve got.
Although he treats the Kurds
Worse than your camel’s turds,
You’d better not dispute his words
Or you’ll be shot.

Now that I’m a grownup, should I find another line of work?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com