MULLY"S DAUGHTER: "Mother! It's the new tenant! Hurry up! You have to hear this!!"
MR. PIGEONTONSILS (RECITING A POEM): "In the fragrance from a honeysuckle clinking by a vine in the raspy sun / Have I known you. / In the song what it wharples a lark on top from a meadow in June..."
MR. PIGEONTONSILS: "By larks it is wings, by butterflies also; / By hornets is stings, In the thorn is a snail, so? / The Deity is in his heaven!!"
THE LISTENERS APPLAUD.
MULLY: "Well give a look! The Age from Romance! Dat's VERY beautiful! I'm Mrs. Fitzgeraldberg and dis is my family being here. You just move in??"
MR. PIGEONTONSILS: "Ah, Mrs. Fitzgeraldberg! What awakened you outside the window, the sweet song of the thrush? Or maybe from a woodland brook a gargle, what it passed by you the window? But your question I must answer.
Yes, I am being your new neighbor, Parcy Pigeontonsils, professional gigolo from your service."
MULLY: "Gigolo!? What's dis 'gigolo?' What's dat?"
NEIGHBOR: "Mully, de whole town's tukking. You know, prying heyes witt wagging tongs! Dey say wot you are gung to the dogs with dis gigolo guy, Mr. Pigeontonsils!"
MULLY: "But I only met him two menutes ago ut here."
NEIGHBOR: "I know, but news travels fast. All over the neighborhood it spilled already all the dirt. I say dis witt all doo rispact, of cuss."
MULLY: "Okay. I just say good-bye to Mr. Pigeontonsils."
MR. PIGEONTONSILS: "Ha ha...you can call me 'Pussy Bunny.' Ha! I'll call you... 'Peaches'...ha ha! Just remember to me giving your life savings! Well, I must be running along. Now I should ketch a haircot."
MULLY (VO): "Ha! You funny boy!"
MR. PIGEONTONSILS (VO): "Peaches, come by me for a ivining! Dun't be beshful. I have a coffee maker in de back. It'll cust you free."
MULLY (VO): "Oh, Mr. Pigeontonsils. How could you say such things? Why you hardly know me!"
MR. PIGEONTONSILS (VO): "Know you, my gorgeous gazelle? All my life I have known your sweet with lovely, your shy with beautiful. your luff savings, your...ouch...Oh!...oh!...I feel all of a sudden faint with dizzy. It swims by me the room...!"
MULLY (VO): "Goodness! Are you alright!!?? I come right over!"
GRANDFATHER: "Ha! It's always the husband the last to find out! Gangster friends I am culling! They'll toss her down a flight from cellar steps. This way for the same price you might hit a jackpot. Could be maybe two broken legs with a neck dislocated."
HUSBAND: "With breaking legs we don't settle things."
HUSBAND: "I know, Mully! I am from trusting you!"
MULLY: "Yi yi yi! You rilly are sick, Mr. Pigeontonsils! Dis chicken soup will help, you'll see! But tell me someting...why you take ladies' money? How you get like dis? Dat's no way!"
MR. PIGEONTONSILS: "(Groans) Well, when I am desolate I am nervous; and when I am nervous I cannot work, and when I cannot work I lay in bed; and when I lay in bed the maid will not clean the house. So you see....."
HUSBAND: "You did a good deed, Mully, and since my wife likes poems, I have memorized one for you. Do you wunt to hear it?"
MULLY: "Why...yes."
HUSBAND (RECITING): " 'Oh, the Owl with the Pussycat went to sea / In a beautiful boat, a pea-green one./ They took along honey with plenty of money,/ With...er, how does that end, now? Oh yes...with a Sinatra album, a mean one.' Well, I'm still working on it. What do you think?"
THE END
BTW: About the writing of this post: you've probably guessed that there's lot of dialogue swipes from Milt Gross here! I wrote the story then searched the Gross oeuvre for sentences and words that would help to fill it out. I love Grossian sentences like, "Maybe sometimes a little lambie love and huneycuddles they get." I'm going to use the word "get" more often in my own writing. It's a powerful little word that packs a big punch, and it's full of funny subtext.
I risked an anti-climax to end the story with a sentimental affirmation of the husband's love for his wife. I lose points for doing that because it makes the story less hip and edgy, but it gains points because it makes us like the characters. Did I do the right thing? Who knows?
Story writing isn't an exact science and the ever present possibility of failure is what makes writing fun.
Also BTW: The story is illustrated with frame grabs from the nifty "Goldbergs" TV series, which can be had on DVD now. The gigolo is Ernie Kovacs.
7 comments:
Bravo! Excellent story!
Nice story, Eddie as usual. Milt Gross was the ultimate cartoonist for sure in a lot of ways, including his impeccable sense of adapting the Yiddish and Jewish accents into the dialog balloons of his work, much like George Herriman made his characters talk in funny dialects, like in the Krazy Kat comics.
"Cum inside, Mully!"
LOL! Did you write this on purpose or was this also something Gross wrote in one of his comics? It's a very funny sexual innuendo if you look at it closely. I have the Complete Collection, but to this day, I still haven't ate up all the beautiful artwork in there.
Steven, Roberto: Thanks! I guess the small response means that most people didn't like this much. Fortunately I got my reward from the insights into Gross that I got from writing and researching it. I feel like I took a whole course in creative writing! The sex inuendo was just an accident.
Woah! Hold your houses Uncle Eddie! A small response doesn't mean people don't like it necessarily, I only found this new post this morning and read it with my breakfast.
Sometimes people just don't have much to say, like with your Exotic Dances in Gladiator films post, interesting food for thought but I didn't have anything to contribute.
Very funny way of talking! I read a similar dialect in a post by John K about 'SuperKatt'
Eddie,
I loved this. At first, the inversion of expected word order threw me a bit, and also the feeling that some of the dialogue was actually iambic pentameter, or at least metrical somehow. Once I got used to it, though, I thought that you really did show off the musicality of Yiddish. And about half way through, I started to wonder 'Hey, I wonder if this is influenced by Milt Gross'? Someone needs to do a good book on how he brought together the best of popular entertainment from 1900 - 1950 under one hat. Another figure like Bob Clampett who conspicuously lacks 'the book.' Incidentally, thinking about cartoonists of that era (Gross, Herriman, Rudolph Dirks etc right down to Walt Kelly) one thing they often have is a mastery of dialect and funny writing as well as funny drawing. Do you think the combination of funny writing AND drawing still has an audience? You sure don't see it with McSweeney's/Drawn & Quarterly/Fantagraphics, etc, whatever other qualities those publications have.
Stephen: Glad you liked it. Writing and researching this made me realize how important dialect is. Yiddish is a particularly good example, but any strong dialect is an opportunity for the writer to play with musical sentense structures.
I wonder if some of Shakespeare is meant to be spoken in dialect? Well, there's the Macbeth characters of course, and low rent characters like Falstaff, but maybe any character that's even slightly comedic is meant to be spoken in a regional accent. I assume dialect humor was common in his time, and it's easier to write poetry in dialect.
I love Grossian sentenses like, "Maybe sometimes a little lambie love and huneycuddles they get." "Lambie love and honeycuddles" is a beautiful and funny construction. The alliteration is obvious, but there's also some kind of poetic thing going on there. Surrounding such a beautiful construction with "Maybe sometimes..." and the blunt "...you get" makes for a terrific contrast.
After finding this I resolved to use the word "get" more often in my own writing. It's a powerful little word that packs a big punch, and it's full of funny subtext.
I love the idea of having someone thrown down the steps because you might get more for your money that way. I also love the reference to the coffee maker in the back and the fact that the coffee is free. Mixing a high falutin' concept like love with a harshly practical thing like free coffee once again makes for a powerful contrast. The fact that the recipient of this offer takes the coffee offer seriously makes it even more funny for me.
I risked an anti-climax to end the story with a sentimental affirmation of the husband's love for his wife. I lose points for doing that because it makes the stoy less hip and edgy, but it gains points because it makes us like the characters and want to see them again. Story writing isn't an exact science and the ever present possibility of failure is what makes writing fun.
Hi Uncle Eddie,
I just stumbled upon your blog today and love it. How would I contact you, I was unable to find your contact information. Are you available for an animation project?
Thanks,
Simone
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