[Ads-l] Wordplay: I=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99d_?=rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy. Also, publication switch to Medium

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Several requests to explore the saying in the subject line have been
sent to me over the years. My electronic files indicate that I first
conducted searches way back in 2009. The statement is usually
attributed to musician Tom Waits, but he was not the originator. There
is now a Quote Investigator article on this topic here.

https://quoteinvestigator.medium.com/3a98fc5717f0

The article above appears on the Medium publishing platform. I
encourage you to visit and follow me on the Medium platform.

My posting strategy has changed. Here is the tentative plan. New
material will appear on Medium, and abbreviated versions of new
articles will appear on the Quote Investigator (QI) website. Here is
an example of an abbreviated article:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/12/23/free-bottle/

Eventually the full articles will migrate to the QI website. Access to
new material on Medium will be partially restricted to Medium
subscribers. If you have an opinion about this change please let me
know on or off list.

The quotation above has been examined by many researchers. Valuable
work has been performed by Barry Popik, Fred Shapiro, Nigel Rees,
Mardy Grothe and others.

Barry, I think, found the crucial snippet match in Google Books dated
1965 in “World Visions and the Image of Man: Cosmologies as
Reflections of Man” by C. W. Berenda (Carlton W. Berenda). Barry also
found the key November 26, 1976 citation supporting the authorship of
Steve Allen.

A kind librarian at the John C. Hodges Library of University of
Tennessee at Knoxville visually verified the 1965 citation for me.

I also found a fascinating passage in a book by Steve Allen in which
he claims to have created the quip spontaneously during his nightclub
act.

[ref] 1987, How To Be Funny: Discovering the Comic You by Steve Allen
with Jane Wollman, Chapter 12: Television Talk Show Comedy, Quote Page
265 and 266, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. (Verified with scans)
[/ref]

[Begin excerpt]
One of the biggest laughs in my nightclub act is a joke in the Dr. Mal
Practice sketch. At that point, I’m talking about having performed
brain surgery. For this particular spot I had written a line saying
that the patient needed a prefrontal lobotomy like he needed a hole in
the head. The line always worked well. But one night, while on the way
to that particular joke, I momentarily forgot the phrase “prefrontal
lobotomy.”

Whenever I have a moment of forgetfulness onstage, I naturally have no
alternative but to revert to the ad-lib mode. A second or two later
the phrase I was fishing for came back to me and I said, “The
operation was a... a... prefrontal lobotomy. Or no, wait a minute.
Maybe it was a free bottle in front of me.”

That line got a much bigger laugh than the regular hole-in-the-head
reference, so naturally it became a permanent part of the routine.
[End excerpt]

Garson

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