"Yahooty" - Origin and definition

[sagehen]

I wrote my brother about the "Yahooty"  enquiry.  I remembered "who's
Yehudi?" but couldn't pin down a context for it.  Here is his answer.
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>This was a thing with Jerry Colonna on the Bob Hope radio program of the
early 1940's. It was a running gag on the show, and got to be a catch-
word all over the country. In the little Bob Hope autobiography "They Got
Me Covered" of 1941, there's a picture on Page 59 of Bob with Jerry
Colonna; Colonna is shown with his eyes crossed and mouth wide open,
singing from a piece of sheet music entitled "Who's Yehoodi?" (I believe
he actually did make a record of such a song.) The sheet music has
a photo of Colonna and Hope on it. In the book, the caption of the
picture is "Why Ascap left the air" -- reference to the big music
royalties battle of 1940-41 wherein the three radio networks were denied
use of any ASCAP music (this was the birth of BMI -- Broadcast Music,
Inc., an alternative licensing agency) and we heard a lot of Tchaikovsky
and Stephen Foster.

Anyway, Yehoodi in the Bob Hope show was basically the little man who
wasn't there. If something was missing, maybe Yehoodi took it. If
somebody has the DT's maybe he can see Yehoodi -- etc etc etc. <
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I daresay all this was coveed in one of the websites earlier posted.
A. Murie