It’s a pie and punch world

by David Benjamin

“Conductor, when you receive a fare,/ Punch in the presence of the passenjare!/ A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,/ A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,/ A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,/ Punch in the presence of the passenjare! … “ — Mark Twain, “Punch, Brothers, Punch”

MADISON, Wis.—It started insidiously—as always happens—on a drowsy evening in front of the TV, with an ad for a drug company that makes parasite remedies for dogs.

(This commercial, of course, signifies the growing tendency of Gen Z couples to raise pets, indulgently, instead of having kids—a trend that’s okay by me because I tend to be annoyed by other people’s mozniks. But these twenty-somethings, who have adopted the term “pet parents,” have turned standard terms like “cat owner” and “dog owner” into the pejorative equivalent of “chink,” “redskin,” “hunyok,” etc. Ah, but that’s a topic for another tirade.)

The dog-drug jingle is a parody of the Village People’s tongue-in-cheek anthem, “Macho Man.” The tune embedded itself in my brain and began an endless, throbbing, inescapable serenade. Author Peter Lewis called this malady “a worm in the ear.” For me, these invasive tunes are more like a maggot riding a go-kart in an all-day, all night loop inside my skull.

Of course—as almost always happens—I didn’t know any lyric except the song’s thumping refrain, “Macho macho man I wanna be a macho macho man … ” It repeating for hours, crowding out other thoughts that might have been meaningful had they not been macho-manned into incoherence. This nagging verse lullabied me not to sleep but to a fitfulness that finally receded into dreams of muscular gay men in outrageous costumes doing calisthenics somehow ironically. When I woke, there it was, looping me toward terminal loopiness …

“ … macho macho man, I wanna be a macho macho man …”

This ordeal was by no means my debut of mind-wracking “musical” repetition. I’ve been haunted since childhood. The worst frustration is that these are rarely songs that I would choose to route constantly between my ears. I wouldn’t much mind a tune by Cole Porter (“Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it …”) or Carole King (“… On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be, and there the world below can’t bother me … “). I could probably stand a week-long serenade of Ella crooning Harold Arlen … “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather, since my man and I ain’t together. Keeps rainin’ all the time…”

But I don’t get Randy Newman or Jerome Kern. My memory gloms onto dog-drug parodies, creepy commercial distortions of “Every Breath You Take”. “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty” pollutes my mind and keeps me awake. Ad jingles, of course, are conceived to be catchy. Once you’re caught by Burger King, there’s no exit.

And it’s not as though I’m a jingle denialist. There are many with which I sang along in my innocent youth, including the immortal Blatz beer paean (“I’m from Milwaukee, and I oughta know … “), the vividly dramatic Brylcreem tableau (“ … Brylcreem, the gals’ll all pursue ya … “) and the longest jingle—for C&H Sugar—ever composed (“C&H, C&H, let’s all sing about C&H! It’s the only pure cane sugar from Hawaii …”). It goes on and on. I know it by heart.

But it doesn’t linger. You sing the last “pure cane sugar” refrain, and the song fades away. On the other hand, there’s an ear-worm melody so invasive and incurable that I dread even typing the title, fearful that it will enter my brain, like that killer worm inserted through Pavel Chekhov’s ear by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. If he’s still among us, I would not object if the sadist who wrote the Disneyland theme, “It’s a Small World” were to be burned at the stake in a bonfire of sheet music.

My first realization that I’m not alone in a world plagued by melodic encephalopathy was a story by Robert McCloskey in his classic collection, Centerburg Tales. In a story called “Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats,” Homer Price and his sidekick Freddy are watching over Uncle Ulysses’ doughnut shop when a mysterious stranger enters. He slips a record into the jukebox, warning the kids, “I beg of you to never set needle to its black unbreakable surface and never let its sounds escape from this beautiful gaudy jukebox.”

Naturally, Homer and Freddy play it —the most infectious song ever loosed on the synapses of the human brain. The song, in part, goes “ … Sing dough-de-dough-dough,/ There’s dough, you know,/ There’s not no nuts/ In you-know-whats./ In a whole doughnut/ There’s a nice whole hole./ When you take a big bite,/ Hold the whole hole tight./ If a little bit bitten,/ Or a great bit bitten,/ Any whole hole with a hole bitten in it,/ Is a holey whole hole/ And it JUST—PLAIN—ISN’T!”

After listening merrily to the catchy tune, Homer and Freddy play it again, sing it again, play it over, learn it by heart and realize they can’t stop. Nor can they resist rendering it to everyone they encounter in an ever-growing throng of Centerburgers wailing away at the top of their lungs, unable to clear this epidemic ditty from their minds and voices.

Finally, speaking in rhythms consistent with the “Pie and Punch” beat, Homer remembers reading a story about just the predicament that had swept the town. He leads his spontaneous choir to the library, where the librarian is just closing up shop for her two-week vacation. She can’t go, croons Homer, because the town’s only salvation is a book whose title and author he has forgotten.

“We have to find a black-backed book, or maybe it’s a brown-backed book,” Homer sings. “And I think it was a little bit battered … dough-de-dough-dough.”

Thereafter the library, roaring with the din of a hundred weary voices singing “Get-gat-gittle, got a hole in the middle,” is ransacked. The happy ending is that they find the book, a collection of sketches by Mark Twain that includes the tale of an ear worm, “Punch, Brothers, Punch.” The gist of Twain’s tale is that the individual infected with the rhyme cannot free himself until he teaches it to someone else, who then must find a victim yet unsullied by the deadly dirge.

“Yep, Freddy,” says Homer after the sixth-grade teacher—last to hear the antidote lyric—staggers from the library desperate for someone to serenade, “somebody’s always gonna be saying it.”

I have my own happy ending.

Sometime in my teens, after listening a hundred times to Bob Dylan’s greatest album, Highway 61 Revisited, I noticed that I’d memorized a haunting blues ballad (probably inspired by train troubadour Jimmie Rodgers),“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” One day, as I was trying to fight off the persistence of a maddeningly stupid song—think “Wild Thing”—I resorted to singing Dylan, under my breath as I rolled over in bed.

I don’t sing well, but I knew all the words. And as I croaked out the last quatrain, “Well, I wanna be your lover, baby/ I don’t wanna be your boss/ Don’t say I never warned you/ When your train gets lost,” I noticed—with a thrill like a blown fuse in my temporal lobe—that I was cured. That tiresome song, whatever it was—I’d forgotten!—was gone. And I had no desire to do an encore of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh”.

My brain had been flushed of larval doggerel. I no longer wanted to hold a “wild thing” tight or become a macho man. I could look around, free and sentient, and speak whole sentences without groping for a way to rhyme “Oscar Mayer weiner.” I could gaze all around me, serene in the knowledge that it’s a big pie-and-punch world, after all.

Until, of course, the next commercial for Jardiance pills …