LP Laughter for a Song

My brother Bob sent me a laugh track today from the past, a cut from the Allan Sherman comedy LP "My Son, The Celebrity." Sherman is part of our family's past, a relic of my dad's love of comedians. Everybody loves comics, I suppose. But when you wrestle with demons like dad did, laughing out loud must have provided an exquisite release.

Sherman was a celebrity for about seven years, starting with a 1962 album that JFK allegedly loved. Sherman couldn't quite manage 50 years on earth before he died of emphysema. Must have smoked like a chimney, common behavior for funny men of the 50s and 60s. His best known song was Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" done to the tune of "Dance of the Hours."

Bob's track came to me from Rhapsody, an online music service that competes with Apple's iTunes but denies Mac users any chance of using it. (Yeah, go figure out that business model.) You can stream Rhapsody's music or pay by the tune to burn it (99 cents). There's another option (ahem) where you capture the stream in a file on your computer for no extra charge, then make something you can burn yourself. I don't know if Allan's heirs would mind so much. Comic lyrics like these below, set to the tune "Alouette", surely must have a finite earning potential:

Al 'n' Yetta love to watch Loretta
When she enters through her fancy door.
They just love The Real McCoys,
Walter Cronkite and The Bowery Boys.

If you're younger than 30, you probably don't get any of those references except Walter. That's the upside of getting old: your hit rate on jokes gets higher all the time.

Bob sent me his MP3 file through yousendit.com, a file transfer holding service. If your mail service chokes on a big file, they can pass it along for you. They provide the gigabytes of disk, you provide the media files, you see a few ads along the way. Free, right? So much on the Internet is free, or appears to be. Or next to free, like the pennies-a-track songs on Russian site allofmp3.com. (Look for the "English" link on the top left if it pops up with Cyrillic letters). Those rascally Russians, always busting the capitalists' chops.