Lost genre of songs?
A couple months ago I saluted Mirth Parade, a 1933 low-budget syndicated show.

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When you treat everything as entertainment, you can live longer and MOST IMPORTANTLY you can learn more.

When everything is EMERGENCY PANIC DEADLY SERIOUS you're not allowed to learn anything.

Learning includes 'science', as I've been pushing lately, and learning also includes the basics of human behavior.

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Why was Jordan Peterson unnecessary in the 1930s? Because HARDASS human nature was part of entertainment. There were romantic songs for sure, but there was also a constant theme that marriage is more trouble than it's worth. The unattached life had its own romance. If you weren't MEANT to be married, you had more freedom.

These views were already extinct when I grew up in the '50s and '60s. Marriage was automatically assumed to be necessary and wonderful. If you weren't MEANT to be married, you weren't qualified to live. Take one for the team NOW.

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Recently my bedtime playlist has included a 1933 series called Mirth Parade. (It doesn't seem to be available free online.) The verbal part of Mirth Parade was low-quality humor by any standards, mainly contrived puns that reached 10 feet beyond funny to cram in a combination of words. Like many of the syndicated shows, the musical part was brilliant.

An episode about sailing and boats includes two HARDASS representations of romantic reality. Neither song would be singable today. Reality is CRIMETHINK, in 'science' and human behavior.

First a version of the familiar Barnacle Bill, not quite legally obscene but HARDASS real. This is how the world works.

Barnacle Bill.

Second, a totally forgotten lively number about a sailor with a dame in every port.

Two-buck Tim from Timbuktu.

Choral version of the same song.

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Several episodes featured songs similar to 'Two-Buck Tim'. They all have the same pattern and probably the same author. Simple tunes and fast complex wordplay. All were performed by the same singer in the same Singsprache form. The singer was identified as Andy Andrews**. Some of the songs are jokes with a clear punchline.

These songs somehow don't fit the usual 'novelty song' category. Most 'novelty songs' are cheerful nonsense, not tightly crafted verses. These are much closer to the British music hall tradition, as in Gilbert and Sullivan.

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

ENTERTAINMENT IS THE OPPOSITE OF GENOCIDE.

LAUGHTER IS THE OPPOSITE OF DEATH.

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** Not much online info about Andrews. Goldindex, the best OTR source, shows his appearances in Mirth Parade plus one National Barn Dance episode. Another source lists most of the Mirth Parade performers as Al Pearce's troupe. Two episodes of Pearce's own show are on Archive.org. They're pretty much the same thing: outstanding music, pointless "comedy".

Again I need to thank those hard-working preservers and digitizers who have been restoring REAL SANE ENTERTAINMENT for the benefit of moderns stuck in a totally insane time. Their work is on the same scale as the Arabs and Persians who preserved and advanced Greek science while Europe was stuck in craziness.

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Entertainment

  ¶ 3:31 PM