Bronx Cheer & Brooklyn Razzoo

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   We'll know more about the "Brooklyn Razzoo" (and possibly the "Bronx
Cheer") when the BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE goes online soon.  In the meantime,
here are some clippings I found.
   (In a few hours, I'll go to the Bronx to find people guilty of parking
tickets.  They don't call it the Bronx Zoo for nothing.)


   12 October 1938, PHILADELPHIA EVENING BULLETIN:
_BRONX DISOWNS CHEER_
_Borough President Says "We Don't Use It Up Here"_
   New York, Oct. 12--(AP)--Take it from James J. Lyons, the Bronx lays no
claim to that discordant noise popularly known as the Bronx cheer.
   Lyons, Bronx borough president, told the Chamber of Commerce "The Bronx
cheer was brought here from outside somewhere and for some inexplicable
reason was named for our borough."
   And Lyons' payoff: "But we don't use it up here."


   12 July 1942, PHILADELPHIA EVENING BULLETIN:
_Bronx Cheer_
_A Misnomer?_
   NEW YORK, July 11 (A. P.).--That loud, American noise of disapproval is
misnamed, in the opinion of Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons.
   "There is no such thing as a Bronx cheer," he said today.  "The so-called
Bronx cheer is a noise brought to the Bronx, especially to the Yankee
Stadium, by vulgar people from outside the Bronx."


   15 July 1940, PHILADELPHIA EVENING BULLETIN:
   "BRONX CHEER" is one of several names given to discordant noises made by
sports fans or occupants of theater galleries.  In baseball slang, its
technique is similar to the "Brooklyn razzoo," requiring considerable facial
distortion.  Bronx borough officials disown the "Bronx cheer" saying it "was
brought here from outside somewhere and for some inexplicable reason was
named for our borough."  Sports writers point out the Yankees baseball team
plays in the Bronx and fans' noise of disapproval so named.  Same applies to
the "Brooklyn razzoo," they say, Brooklyn baseball fans being the most ardent
in the country.  Another name for such labioglossal sounds is "The Bird,"
inherited from 19th century theater.  The gallery made a hissing sound in
giving an actor "the bird," so-named from hissing sound of a goose; hence
also, "the big bird."  More familiar, perhaps, are "razz" and "razzberry,"
variants of word raspberry.