Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:

day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come

And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.

(Thanks to Susan Fischer for passing this Coverly cartoon on to me)

Then, in my 5/23/14 posting “Piercing”, on a piece of Stan Freberg’s comedy routine of 1957:

 [“Piercing, man, piercing’] comes from musical comic Stan Freberg: his “Banana Boat Song” of 1957 [a riff on Harry Belafonte’s hit song], which you can view here:

The routine has two players: a lead singer (1, sung material is in boldface; otherwise, everything is spoken) and a beatnik bongo drummer (2, speaking only):

1: Daylight come and
Me wan go home
2: My ears, man, like my ears
1: Day.
2: No, hold it, man
1: Me say day-o
2: It’s too shrill, man
2: It’s too piercing
1: Well, I don’t see why
2: No, it’s too piercing, man
It’s too piercing
1: Well, I got to do the shout
2: No, man, it’s too piercing

To this day, 67 years later, the word piercing tends to evoke a really loud day-a-ay-o for me.

This entry was posted on August 3, 2024 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, 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.