3 posts tagged “tom lehrer”
Audio: Share a great love song.
oh wait i thought you said a hate/love song
Time for some nostalgia, bah humbug and ... weirdness. Something for everyone!
I watched a lot of The Monkees at an impressionable age with no lasting effects, aside from having to wear a ski hat when playing guitar. But one memory that always stuck with me was of a haunting chant-like song they did in one of their Christmas episodes. I realized it was probably online by now and here it is:
A thousand singing herons I saw passing,
Flying overhead, sounding a thousand voices,
Exhulting, "Glory be in the heavens, and peace on Earth, for Jesus has been born."
It flows a bit better in the original.
If you are firmly in the "bah humbug" camp at this time of year, here is a song you can sing when gathered around the family piano this weekend:
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens;
Mix the punch; drag out the Dickens
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again
Finally, there is this...song....which is one of the oddest Chirstmas cover tunes you'll ever come across:
I'm catching up with some TV shows from this week and I see I'm not the only one who thought Sorkin was influenced by Steve Martin's "Not Gonna Phone It In Tonight" SNL musical number (sorry, can't find video). Indeed, Google tells me many felt it had the same feel as what he was going for at the end of the second episode. And yet no one has found/put video of the Steve Martin bit online. Come on internets.
I was ok with the whole "L.A. Symphony" angle, but he needed a better song than a "I am the Very Model of..." parody. I'm not sure what would have worked better, but then again that's why I'm not getting paid thousands of dollars per episode.
Overall, I think Sorkin will have it easy in the long run because he only has to ever show us snippets of sketches that are supposed to be funny, and it is relatively easy to come up with a good idea and have 15 seconds of funny material vs. actually writing a sketch that keeps bringing the funny.
On the other hand, the Studio60 opening number was the exact level of "eh, marginally clever" that I would expect from most SNL bits these days, so maybe he is just cranking up the realism.
In closing, here are two "I am the Very Model of..." parodies, a classic by Tom Lehrer, and a more recent bit from the Animaniacs:
