To close off my discussion of Allan
Sherman, I need to review the book that set the Sherman “renaissance”
in motion, Mark Cohen’s biography Overweight
Sensation: the Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman. In my last entries on Sherman, I disagreed with
Cohen’s verdict on Allan’s two books — his biography, however,
is a fine one that addresses Sherman’s life and work from a number
of different angles.
Cohen’s research is impeccable. In
the first portion of the book, he successfully untangles Sherman’s
quite tangled familial relationships, to the extent of charting where
Allan’s family “disappeared” to when his criminal stepfather
had to quickly flee Los Angeles for getting caught passing bad
checks. He does a similarly excellent job conveying the relationships
that fostered and cultivated Allan’s talent (most prominently, his
unashamedly Jewish maternal grandparents) and those he struggled with
even after the person was long dead (his mother, who did her best to
assimilate, and sublimate her Jewishness).
The book clearly breaks down into three
sections: Allan’s childhood and pre-fame adulthood; his sudden,
massive stardom; and his sad “fall from grace” in show business.
The most interesting aspect of the book is the way that Cohen
analyzes Sherman’s lyrics with the sober-minded intensity of an
academic, while he also displays a fanboy-like affection for this
work, providing us diehard fans with a trove of previously unheard
lyrics that qualify as some of Sherman’s funniest, silliest, and
(not surprisingly) most Jewish songs. Cohen's unearthing of these
lost gems resulted in the first “new” Sherman CD in years, There
Is Nothing Like a Lox.
The childhood portion of the book finds
Cohen taking on the role of storyteller, occasionally making jokes
about the subject matter. When Allan becomes a sudden superstar,
Cohen includes essays about Sherman’s most famous songs, discussing
them in some depth as cultural artifacts and landmarks of American
Jewish culture.
At these points he vaunts Sherman as
perhaps the seminal Jewish humorist of the mid-20th century, studying
his lyrics and designating them as important works of social satire.
This could be seen as taking it a bit too far, were it not for the fact
that Sherman’s lyrics (which Cohen delightfully quotes at length)
were, and are, damned funny and clever.
Like any good fan, Cohen’s emotional
proximity to his subject is communicated throughout the book. He
seems positively outraged when he recounts the many times that
Sherman showed his childish side in public. Allan declared to
journalist Nora Ephron that “My parents divorced when I was 6 and I
spent the rest of my life at Fred Astaire and Dick Powell movies.
This caused me to lose my grip on reality.”
At times, Cohen sounds like a
disappointed parent lamenting the puerile behavior of his beloved
child. The thing that becomes clear, though, from a close reading of
both Sherman’s autobio A Gift of Laughter and Overweight Sensation (and a close listening to his songs) is that his childish behavior was
directly linked to his childlike sense of wonder at the insanity of
the world. His corny pronouncements about the blissful nature of
children’s innocence were the flip side of his ability to write
through the eyes of a youngster (the fact that his biggest hit was
“Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” was not a surprise). Here Allen
comments on the song (in a video posted by Cohen):
Allan’s childishly simple view of the
world also seems to have allowed him to have the balls... er, chutzpah to write dozens of song
parodies, perform them at parties, and then carve out a musical
career, when he possessed neither a Greek physique nor a great
singing voice. He was clearly a man driven by his instincts — his
best albums were written in a matter of weeks before they were
recorded.
 |
| Allen with the cast of I've Got a Secret. |
Sherman, in fact, suffered from the
classic performer’s dilemma: a mixture of self-loathing and rampant
egomania. Cohen chronicles how he indulged in his addictions —
gambling, smoking, and most especially eating — while he was a
young man and then a producer of game shows in both NYC and LA (the
most important one being I’ve Got a Secret,
which he co-created).
Once he hit it big with his first LP,
My Son the Folk Singer, he plunged even deeper
into these addictions and was finally able to indulge in a fourth
that had always been his main obsession growing up (as recounted in
his autobiography A Gift of Laughter and his
chronicle of the sexual revolution, The Rape of the A*P*E*),
namely sex. Cohen was told by the classical pianist Leonid Hambro, a
good friend of Sherman’s, about the orgies he and Allan attended
(whose habituees also included George Plimpton — those lucky
ladies!).
Like many comedians, Sherman was
clearly a major depressive. Despite his chutzpah, he also suffered
from severe self-loathing and a realistic viewpoint about the
vagaries of fame. He never felt comfortable with his success, noting
in Daily Variety “If you can get this lucky all
of a sudden, you can get that unlucky, too.” He added to a reporter
at the New York Journal-American in regard to his
premonitions that his fame would go away, “I'm pledged not to get
desperate.”
Much of the final portion of
Overweight Sensation is given over to the ways in
which Sherman undermined his own efforts in show business with self-destructive and exceptionally naïve behavior. Ultimately, though,
he left us a legacy of brilliant, infernally catchy comedy songs,
which Cohen celebrates throughout the book.
In the final chapter, Cohen goes past Allan’s death to discuss how Sherman’s music went out of and back into popular favor. Although at points Cohen seems to be giving Sherman credit for all modern Jewish-American comedy, it is very true that Allan’s albums remain masterworks of both wordplay and ethnic “belonging.” Allan once said to an interviewer, “everyone is part Jewish.” He wasn’t wrong.
*****
Cohen devotes several pages in the book
to an ongoing set of songs that Allan called “Goldeneh Moments from
Broadway.” Most of the tunes are available on the There Is
Nothing Like a Lox CD, but Cohen also has uploaded several
to YouTube. Sherman introduced the concept at the parties he
performed at in this way: “It occurred to me, what if all of the
great hit songs from all of the great Broadway shows had actually
been written by Jewish people? Which they were.”
On occasional, though, of course, there
was a song that was easily parodied that was written by a gentile. In
this case, Meredith Wilson's “Seventy-six Trombones” from the
smash musical The Music Man was transformed by
Allan into “Seventy-six Sol Cohens” (all of the following postings are from Cohen's YT account):
“Over the Rainbow” becomes
“Overweight People”:
A parody of “Summertime” from Sherman's Porgy and Bess rewrite “Solly and Shirl”:
Another song by a gentile, “You're
the Top” by Cole Porter, gets the Sherman treatment:
His stirring and very silly “You'll
Never Walk Alone” spoof “When You Walk Through the Bronx”:
Finally, one of the best songs from
Sherman's first LP, one that Cohen talks about for a few pages, Allan's tongue-twisting rewrite of the already pretty
tongue-twisted Irish tune “Dear Old Donegal,” “Shake Hands With
Your Uncle Max”:
Note: Some of the pictures in
this blog entry come from Mark Cohen's website about
Overweight Sensation, which can be found at
allanshermanbiography.com.
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