Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

7 | My Son, the Celebrity

145 “Do you think we did it in there, in the control room?” By the time Sherman asked the recording engineers if the My Son, the Celebrity album session was over, he had dutifully followed a friend’s instructions to “get loaded.” On outtakes from the session a shell-shocked and tipsy Sherman tells the assembled audience, “I don’t understand the whole thing. I don’t understand the whole thing starting on August 6 when we did the first session. . . . But I’m willing to accept it because from the first time I knew I was in show business I knew it was insane.” He had not seen anything yet. Celebrity was recorded over three days, including November 30, 1962, his thirty-eighth birthday. In late November Sherman’s sales were tremendous and certainly warranted the celebrity status his second album’s title both touted and lampooned, but there was more to come. Folk Singer was still picking up speed. It was number 28 on Billboard’s Top LP’s chart the week ending November 10, number 9 a week later, number 2 on November 24, and number 1 on December 1 and December 8. On December 15, Billboard reported sales hit 1 million, and on January 5, 1963, My Son, the Celebrit y 146 / Overweight Sensation he was pictured smiling on the magazine’s cover flanked by the president of Warner Bros., Jack Warner, and Mike Maitland, president of Warner Bros. Records. All three held aloft Folk Singer’s Gold Record award. CelebrityfurtheredSherman’srise.OnDecember26, Varietypraisedthesecondalbumas “agooddealsharperandmorewittythanthefirsteffort.”Aweek later Billboard asked, “Who says lightning never strikes twice?” Distributors agreed that it would and placed advance orders for 200,000 Celebrity albums. Theywereright.Timemagazinekickedoffmediacoverageofthenewalbumin the New Year with a January 4, 1963, ovation. It delighted in Sherman’s brand of nonsense and celebrated My Son, the Celebrity and its parody of “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” the popular poem and song by the eighteenth century Scottish poet Robert Burns. Its exact meaning has been debated. Is the rye a river or a field of grain? Sherman’s research, conducted at Jewish delicatessens across the country, discovered an overlooked meaning. Do not make a stingy sandwich Pile the cold cuts high. Customers should see salami Comin’ thro’ the rye. Time also enjoyed “When I Was a Lad,” an updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s song from H.M.S. Pinafore that transposes the rewards of trivial accomplishments from the Queen’s navy to the canyons of Madison Avenue. Sherman pulled this gem out of his desk drawer. He wrote it in June 1959 while he worked on the Perry Como summer television series, Perry Presents. The cheerfully superficial hero sums up his successful advertising career with a note of gratitude. “So I thank old Yale, and I thank the Lord/And I also thank my father who is chairman of the board.” But the weekly’s favorite was “Won’t You Come Home, Disraeli,” another reworking of the “Bill Bailey” tune Sherman used in 1942 for his college hit, “Don’t Burn Down Bidwell’s.” The song features a lovesick Queen Victoria comically pining for Benjamin Disraeli,thelatenineteenth-centuryBritishprimeministerofJewishancestry. In “Disraeli,” Sherman pulled off feats of wit that match up well with parody legends.Thenineteenth-centuryAmericancomicplaywrightJohnBrougham “was in the avant-garde of the demolition campaign” that finished off the My Son, the Celebrity / 147 old pieties of his time, and when he got going he sprinkled his parodies with “totally anachronistic elements such as telegraphs and railroads.” Brougham’s work “was not an academic exercise in literary parody.” On the contrary, he “was very conscious of the contemporary interests of his audience, and he did not limit their laughter to a now obsolete genre.” The description is apt. Sherman had the same nonacademic inclinations and discovered for himself Brougham’s technique of including in his parodies anachronisms that would delight his audience. Sherman’s Queen Victoria complains to Disraeli, You claim official business Took you away To Egypt and Bombay and Rome. Well, I’m not so certain, Cause you’re a 19th century Richard Burton Disraeli, won’t you please come home? The newsmagazine’s circulation of more than three million made it influential enough, but Time was also the voice of Middle America. It once drove beat poet Allen Ginsberg crazy. “I’m obsessed by Time Magazine,” he wrote in his 1956 poem “America.” Time, Ginsberg...