Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Following “Somewhere over my poncho” (here), Bill Griffith goes on to “Lady chow mein”:

As Lise Menn pointed out in a comment on “Somewhere over my poncho” these mangled lyrics are in the tradition of Walt Kelly’s famous “Deck us all with Boston Charlie” (taking off on “Deck the halls with boughs of holly”). No doubt there are other precedents as well.

This is a style of nonsense verse that takes some familiar verse and subjects it to massive intentional mondegreening. I don’t know if there’s an established name for the genre.

The nonsense can be remarkably sticky. I have the text of “Boston Charlie” so firmly in my head that it takes me a little while to recover the correct words. “Lady chow mein” might yet displace “Lady of Spain” as a goofy accordion classic.

(I suspect that there will be more Zippy cartoons on similar lines. I probably won’t try your patience by posting more of them, though I find them tremendously entertaining. But then I’m easily amused.)

This entry was posted on November 1, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.