Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

Prologue: Overweight Sensation

xi On October 26, 1962, it still wasn’t clear everything would be okay and the Cuban Missile Crisis would not lead to nuclear war. There were two days to go in the thirteen-day showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union. Missile construction in Cuba charged ahead, and Fidel Castro urged the Soviets to bomb America if the U.S. invaded Cuba. It was a good day to count your blessings, especially if you were a top government official in Washington . So Newton N. Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a note of thanks to Allan Sherman. “DearAllanSherman:MY SON, THE FOLK SINGER hasbroughtbrightness into our lives in some difficult hours here. It’s very, very funny.” Minow was not the only Washington official to put Sherman’s new million -selling album on the turntable when things got crazy. In the Camelot years, President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie swung open the doors of the White House to welcome America’s greatest artists, musicians, actors, and writers. But in addition to the energy of Leonard Bernstein, the sober gravity of Pablo Casals, the sturdiness of Carl Sandburg and the elegance of George Overweight Sensation xii / Prologue Balanchine there was a record album by a fat man with a coarse voice singing about seltzer, the garment industry, and why being a knight wasn’t really so great (aluminum pants). President Kennedy had trouble sitting through a cello concert. He grew fidgety during chamber music pieces. But he loved the Jewish song parodies of Allan Sherman. “I can’t say how much we have enjoyed the record,” wrote the president’s special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a November 6, 1962, note to Sherman about his first album, My Son, the Folk Singer. That record lifted Sherman from obscurity to the heights of American celebrityandkickedoffoneofthemostsensationalwinningstreaksinAmerican comedy. Between October 1962 and August 1963, Sherman released My Son, The Folk Singer,My Son, The Celebrity, and My Son, The Nut. All three albums went gold, sold a total of 3 million copies, sparked a fifteen-city concert tour and landed Sherman dozens of national television appearances that brought his comedy to tens of millions. Audiences across the country laughed and applauded as he thumbed his nose at classic American songs. “The Streets of Laredo” became “The Streets of Miami,” where Jewish businessmen gunned it out and the loser “crumbled/Just like a piece halvah.” “The Ballad of Harry Lewis” replaced “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and in Sherman’s version the warehouse stored “the drapes of Roth,” not grapes of wrath (difficult to mark down). He played Carnegie Hall; befriended Harpo Marx; discovered Bill Cosby; metPresidentKennedy;sangfortheNationalPressClub,theU.S.Department of Labor, and Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign; and very incongruously participated in a New York orgy frequented by luminaries including George Plimpton. The country’s greatest songwriters and composers and comedians recognized his talent. Richard Rodgers had worked with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, two of Broadway’s best lyricists, and he explored partnering with Sherman to create an original musical. Johnny Mercer and the great Irving Berlin sent congratulations through mutual friends, and Harpo Marx showed him off to Jack Benny and George Burns. They loved him, and so did much of the country. His fame hit its peak in the summer of 1963 with the extraordinary international success of “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp),” which won Sherman a Grammy Award and Prologue / xiii was turned into a children’s book and even a board game. As an account of the record industry noted, in the early 1960s Sherman personified The Moment. Sherman’scompletelyunexpectedandextraordinarysuccesschangedAmerican comedy and popular culture. For the first time since the end of vaudeville more than a half-century earlier, Jewish dialect humor spread to mainstream culture and led to fame and fortune. Ethnicity was back. The ethnic identity business has long been a very Jewish occupation. From the time of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, American Jews have struggled to balance “the competing impulses of assimilation and ethnic self-affirmation.” In the first decades of the twentieth century, with the encouragement of a country in an inhospitable mood, many Jews sacrificed ethnicity. To ensure it would die out, Congress in 1924 dramatically reduced immigration. Sherman was born in Chicago that year to parents who, as Saul Bellow described the phenomenon, “brought...