From the Poetry Vault Dept.: I found an old essay of mine that I wrote with no eye to publication. I merely wanted to indulge my persistent grumpiness by analyzing a song parody to explain why it doesn’t work.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM with trying to parody someone like Oscar Hammerstein. You have to know the rules of scansion and rhyming. And you have to know how to set up a gag so the payoff is as effective as possible. There’s a parody of “My Favorite Things” that’s been around for a while, aimed at the aged (like me). But it reflects the poor craftsmanship of junior-league poets. Let’s see what we’re working with here:
It begins: “Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,
Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,”
But “fittings” and “knitting” don’t rhyme properly.
“Bundles of magazines tied up in string,
These are a few of my favorite things.”
Ditto “string” and “things.” In the original, the line is “Brown paper packages tied up with strings.” You’re constricted by the need to rhyme with “things,” but a quick check of the options suggests the following: “Wasting the time that retirement brings,” “Wrapping your butt in disposable slings,” etc.
It continues: “Cadillacs and cataracts and hearing aids and glasses,”
But “Cadillac” and “cataract” and “hearing aids” are dactyls; because it’s a 3/4 time song, the rhyme scheme calls for bacchius feet, each built from a spondee and the word “and.” If you’re not familiar with those terms for poetic elements, you at least should be able to intuit those rhythms.
“Polident and Fixodent and false teeth in glasses,”
Ditto “Polident” and “Fixodent.” Also, those are both dental adhesives. It would be more amusing to use just one and to find another complementary product. Also, in the world of light verse, rhyming “glasses” with “glasses” is simply poor poetry.
“Pacemakers, golf carts and porches with swings,”
This is simply a list with no sense of progression. Although Hammerstein’s original is cloying, it’s skillfully built.
“These are a few of my favorite things.”
“When the pipes leak,
When the bones creak,
When the knees go bad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And then I don't feel so bad.”
Here we’ve gone from a circumstantial to a physical phenomenon with the first two lines, and the physical aspect is continued in the next. Continuity is important. In the original, two painful experiences give way to depression: “When the dog bites/When the bee stings/When I'm feeling sad.” The parody stanza could be salvaged by taking an unexpected turn in line three, e.g., “When my wife goes mad.” Or by rewriting the last line to be consistent with the theme of the parody, thus re-fashioning the stanza; e.g., “With my hearing/Disappearing/With each shiny pill/I simply remember those favorite things/And then I feel older still.”
“Hot tea and crumpets, and corn pads for bunions,”
“Crumpets” supports “hot tea,” but strikes me as a wishy-washy choice in this context.
“No spicy hot food or food cooked with onions,”
The phrase “spicy hot food” doesn’t scan properly; the “bunions-onions” gag is weakened by using the less-common term first. And we’ve already fastened on the notion of “spicy hot food,” weakening the plausibility of onions being a no-no.
“Bathrobes and heat pads and hot meals they bring,”
Using “hot food” in line two and “hot meals” here resonate too plangently. Also, “bring” and “things” don’t rhyme. And who are the “they” bringing the meals? Specificity sharpens light-verse construction.
“These are a few of my favorite things.”
“Back pains, confused brains, and no fear of sinnin,”
Again, “confused brains” doesn’t scan properly, and is too nonspecific to be funny. “Sinnin’,” rendered colloquially, needs an apostrophe, but there’s no reason not to use “sinning” and “thinning,” as we shall see.
“Thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinin,”
Here again, the “thin” in “Thin bones” doesn’t work as well as, say “weak bones.” Especially as “thin” and “thinnin’” clash and the latter is spelled wrong.
“And we won't mention our short shrunken frames,”
But, of course, we did mention it. Seeing that the entirety of this lyric is confessional, it seems out of place. Also, “frames” and “things” – you guessed it – don’t rhyme.
“When we remember our favorite things.”
“When the joints ache,
When the hips break,
When the eyes grow dim,
Then I remember the great life I've had,
And then I don't feel so bad.”
The bard must have grown tired here. The rhyme scheme is thrown away on a quatrain that purports to end this ditty but took us nowhere. The point of a “list song,” as this type of number is termed, is to present a series of successive surprises. All in all, this is an amateurish piece of work – well-intentioned, I’m sure, but so revealing of a lack of light-verse skill that it becomes, to my ears, merely embarrassing. I would point any would-be versifier to the opening chapters of Clement Wood’s venerable “Complete Rhyming Dictionary” for a thoughtful, thorough course in putting together those stanzas with satisfying rhymes. And it doesn’t hurt to study the lyrics of the masters – Hammerstein, of course, but also Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Noël Coward, and Stephen Sondheim, to name a few of the best – for models of poetic perfection.
7 July 2002
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