[Ads-l] Punning band-name + anecdote
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Aug 23 05:09:00 UTC 2016
"Itty-Bitty-Diddy Committee"
punning on
"Itty-Bitty-Titty Committee," clearly.
GoogleBks has the phrase back to 1977, but I first heard it in 1967. It was
used against a female heckler by Professor Erwin Corey, The World's
Greatest Authority: "I see that you're a member of the..." I don't know
whether he invented it. But he was the first person that I heard use it. He
followed up with,
"Get thee to a nunnery! Or is it already too late?"
Obviously, that one didn't get off the ground.
Corey was opening for Flip Wilson at the old Redd Foxx Club, in Los Angeles.
Just as Chuck Berry never appeared at Chuck Berry's, his eponymous club in
St Louis, in like manner, Foxx never appeared at the Foxx. Neither joint,
each hardly more than a dive, could afford to pay its namesake.
Trivia: Wilson died in 1998 at the age of 64, but Corey is still alive,
today, at the age of 114.
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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