Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the One Big Happy from 3/11, Ruthie belts her heart out for her dolls:

(#1) An intentional parody — well, burlesque, or travesty — performed with great enthusiasm by Ruthie

Look at the first panel of the cartoon. If the prosody of the first line, “Keep lettin’ him snooze”, doesn’t clue you in to the song being parodied, then maybe the diambic last line of the first stanza, “No spoon, one fork”, will do the trick. Or… you can wait for the last stanza, in the fourth panel, where Ruthie gives it to you straight.

We’ve been here before on this blog, in my 7/17/17 posting “Start spreading the gnus”, whose title quotes this punning burlesque of the song’s first line:

(#2)

The song is, in fact, easily (and therefore widely) parodied. A recent politically pointed example, from The Wrap site’s “Colbert Pays Musical Tribute to [REDACTED]’s Florida Move With ‘New York, New York’ Parody: [REDACTED] says he changed his permanent residence because “I have been treated very badly” by NY state leaders”, by Ross A. Lincoln on 11/4/19, reporting that:

… the Late Show’s tribute … featured a Sinatra-esque crooner singing modified lyrics to “New York, New York,” originally written for Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film of the same name

The parody begins:

Start spreading the news
[He]’s leavin’ today
He wants to be apart from it,
New York, New York

Go tell the fake news
He’s longing to stray …

(By now, of course, you will have been well and truly ear-wormed.)

This entry was posted on April 3, 2020 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Puns. 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.