Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Ima Peach
Ima Peach who?
Ima Peached Trump 2020
Is this some sort of bad kids’ joke? Not in 2020 America. How far we’ve come in the last four years since January 2016, when Trump was still not generally considered a serious Republican candidate, much less a threat to America’s Rule of Law and Constitutional order.
As with so much of what we thought we knew together, and which we shared, it turns out there is both a historical and political dimension to the phenomena of silly knock-knock jokes which burst on the American scene in the early 1930’s, just about 100 years ago.
NPR did a wonderful story on the secret history of knock-knock jokes in March 2015, before the rise of Trump. Actually the history is not a secret; rather its origins are more unknown or unremembered in our common popular culture.
From NPR (March 3, 2015):
Before there were knock-knock jokes — as we know them — there were “Do You Know” jokes. Writing in the Oakland Tribune, Merely McEvoy recalled that around 1900, a jokester would walk up to someone and pop a question like: “Do you know Arthur?” And the unsuspecting listener would reply, “Arthur who?” And the jokester would say “Arthurmometer!” and run off laughing.
“Jokes, like comets have definite orbits,” McEvoy observed on May 26, 1922. “Most of them travel in ellipses of 20 years.” The Arthurmometer-type joke, he wrote, had returned — as a new type of jest or a “nifty.”
Such nifties were popular among the flappers, McEvoy noted, who would ask: “Have you ever heard of Hiawatha?” And you would reply: “Hiawatha who?” And the flapper would say: “Hiawatha a good girl … till I met you.”
“Can it last?” McEvoy wondered. “Probably not. Let us hope that soon I will be able to meet you on the street and ask if you know Gladys and you will say Gladys who and I will say Gladys Zellitsover.”
But the mania only morphed into an even more popular form: the knock-knock joke. And by the mid 1930s, knock-knock jokes were to be heard everywhere. Strangers told them on the streets. Businesses staged knock-knock contests. Swing orchestras wove knock-knock schtick into songs.
The craze was especially potent in Pennsylvania. The Harrisburg Telegraph of June 17, 1936, credited the rise of Knock-Knock Mania to the selection of Col. Frank Knox as the running mate for that year’s Republican presidential candidate, Alf Landon. People at WKBO radio station in Harrisburg told Knox jokes on air throughout the day. The Telegraph printed a couple of punchline examples: Cecil have music wherever she goes. And Ammonia a bird in a gilded cage.
“You can’t turn the radio on anymore without getting one of the Knock-Knock gags,” Jean Mackenzie observed in a radio-listening column in the July 25, 1936, News Herald of Franklin, Pa. “They’re fun and when some of the better orchestras perform them, they’re screams. But you’ve probably found that out for yourself.”
…
From the East Coast to the West Coast, Americans went nuts over knock-knocks. “The whole thing is a game,” the Kerrville Times in Texas explained in August of 1936. “Who started it, where, and what it is called is a mystery.”
Knock-knock clubs formed in towns in Illinois, Iowa and Kansas. In Missouri a popular version of the joke came from a college campus: Popeye. Popeye need some money. The Knock-Knock Song by Vincent Lopez, et al., became a favorite of some big bands. “That tune inflicted a fiendish game upon an America already suffering through the Depression,” Lopez wrote in Lopez Speaking, his 1960s autobiography,
Lopez, Fletcher Henderson and other swing orchestra leaders incorporated the audience-participation novelty song into their acts.
Talk about going viral: Paul Harrison, a syndicated gossip columnist, noted in 1936 that “Hollywood has failed to escape infection by the germ of that game Knock-Knock … that has grown-ups as well as children going daffy.” He passed along new kickers, including: Sarah doctor in the house?
By September of 1936, spoilsports were ready for the knock-knock fad to fade away. “The best knock-knock was made by me,” observed Heywood Hale Broun in his column, which appeared in the Reading Times. “It goes: ‘Knock-knock. Who’s there? A gang of vigilantes armed with machine guns, leather straps and brass knuckles to thump the breath out of anybody who persists in playing this blame fool knock-knock game.’ ”
…
Are knock-knock jokes funny or not? Are they examples of high wittiness or half-wittedness? The battle continues today.
Whatever you believe, the groans caused by knock-knock jokes are frequent sounds in our national chorus. Knock-knocks are ubiquitous. Amazon offers scores of books containing only knock-knock jokes, including volumes specifically tailored to Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Minecraft. A newly Kickstarter-funded interactive dinosaur toy — which taps into IBM’s cognitive supercomputer Watson — tells knock-knock jokes.
However, in the Kids N Comedy shows at the Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea, the New York Times reports regularly, clubgoers needn’t worry that young stand-up comedians will perform knock-knock jokes. “This crew is sophisticated,” the Times opines. *
But apparently knock-knock jokes are sophisticated enough to deserve a correction in the New York Times. In 2013, the newspaper apologized for incorrectly crediting a knock-knock joke in a Ben Affleck movie. You may remember the joke. The punchline included the name of the movie: Argo.
Something to the effect of: Argo jump in the lake.
So, America there you have it. The modern era of knock-knock jokes traces to the doomed Republican presidential ticket of 1936, when Alf Landon picked Col Frank Knox of Chicago to be his Vice-Presidential running mate, and both of them were slain by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt winning his third term, taking every state but Vermont and Maine, when those places were rock-ribbed Republican strongholds. Roosevelt won the Electoral College vote in 1936 by 523-8, the worst wipeout in modern American political history; bigger than Johnson (1964), Nixon (1972), or Reagan (1984).
The craze infected music and Hollywood pop culture, the media, commercial advertising, and cultural divides. Critic columnist Heywood Hale Broun threatened virtual vigilante action (a high brow inversion joke on today’s circumstances). The whole movement may have had its epicenter in our current battleground swing state of Pennsylvania at the Harrisburg radio station WKBO.
As for musical accompaniment, we need look no further than Vincent Lopez and his big band orchestra out of Brooklyn New York with his poplar hit the “Knock Knock, Who’s There” song from 1936, derided by critics of all stripes and played everywhere anyway.
Conductor Composer Vincent Lopez (1895-1975) was no flash in the pan, one hit wonder. His career stretched from 1915 until the mid 1970’s, more than a sixty year run. Noted musicians who played in his band included Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. His piano playing inspired Eddy Duchin and Liberace.
From Wikipedia:
Vincent Lopez was born of Portuguese immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York and was leading his own dance band in New York City by 1917. On November 27, 1921 his band began broadcasting on the new medium of entertainment radio; the band’s weekly 90-minute show on the Newark, New Jersey, station WJZ boosted the popularity of both himself and of radio. He became one of America’s most popular bandleaders, and would retain that status through the 1940s.
He began his radio programs by announcing “Lopez speaking!”. His theme song was “Nola”, Felix Arndt’s novelty ragtime piece of 1915, and Lopez became so identified with it that he occasionally satirized it. (His 1939 movie short for Vitaphone, Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra, features the entire band singing “Down with Nola”.)
Lopez worked occasionally in feature films, notably The Big Broadcast (1932) and as a live-action feature in the Max Fleischer cartoon I Don’t Want to Make History (1936). In 1940, he was one of the very first bandleaders to work in Soundies movie musicals. He made additional Soundies in 1944.
Noted musicians who played in his band included Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Mike Mosiello, Fred Lowery, and Glenn Miller. He also featured singers Keller Sisters and Lynch, Betty Hutton, and Marion Hutton. Lopez’s longtime drummer was the irreverent Mike Riley, who popularized the novelty hit “The Music Goes Round and Round”.
Lopez’s flamboyant style of piano playing influenced such later musicians as Eddy Duchin and Liberace.
In 1941 Lopez’s Orchestra began a residency at the Taft Hotel in Manhattan that would last 20 years.
In the early 1950s, Lopez along with Gloria Parker hosted a radio program broadcast from the Taft Hotel called Shake the Maracas in which audience members competed for small prizes by playing maracas with the orchestra.
Vincent Lopez died at the Villa Maria nursing home in North Miami, Florida, on 20 September 1975.
Listen to Lopez’ signature tune Nola, a ragtime hit from 1915.
Frank Knox is an interesting minor character in U.S. political history. A staunch Republican, he was also an actual patriot, back when that word meant more than cheap talk from craven leaders. He served with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish American War, and then again in the U.S. Army artillery in France in World War I. Finally he proudly served as the Secretary of the U.S. Navy under his political opponent Franklin Roosevelt, less than 4 years after he got his electoral ass whipped in a Presidential election. He died while in office (1944) , one year before his Commander in Chief, still serving America for the third time in his 70 years.
That was how Americans responded to National Crises, before the Age of What’s in it for Me and My Bank Account, foisted on all of us by the Temporary Drudge in the White House.
Trump will never change. He has proven that over and over. But Republican Senators and Congressmen might want to take note of patriotic action and the national interest. Interesting that today when the Senate passed an overdue resolution about asserting Congressional War Powers authority as required by our Constitution, just 8 of 53 Republicans had the balls and patriotism to buck Cadet Bone Spurs, currently sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania, who has already announced he will veto it.
Amazing for a know nothing, uneducable, stubborn, and vengeful draft evader to cow 240 or so otherwise elected Republican officials, who get their entire paychecks from American taxpayers like you and me, over a constitutionally mandated responsibility. A docile bunch of bovine milk carriers is this current lot, to be sure.
From Wikipedia:
William Franklin Knox (January 1, 1874 – April 28, 1944) was an American politician, newspaper editor and publisher. He was also the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1936, and Secretary of the Navy under Franklin D. Roosevelt during most of World War II. Knox was mentioned by name in Adolf Hitler’s speech of December 11, 1941, in which Hitler asked for a German declaration of war against the United States.
Born in Boston, he attended Alma College and served with the Rough Riders during the Spanish–American War. After the war, he became a newspaper editor in Grand Rapids, Michigan and a prominent supporter of the Republican Party. He advocated U.S. entrance into World War I and served as an artillery officer in France. The 1936 Republican National Convention nominated a ticket of Alf Landon and Knox, and they were defeated by Roosevelt and John Nance Garner in the 1936 election.
After World War II broke out, Knox supported aid to the Allies. In 1940, Roosevelt appointed him as Secretary of the Navy in hopes of building bipartisan support. He presided over a naval buildup and pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans. Knox served as Secretary of the Navy until his death in 1944.
In 1930, Frank Knox became publisher and part owner of the Chicago Daily News. In the 1936 election, he was the Republican nominee for vice president under Alf Landon. Landon, Knox and former President Herbert Hoover were the only supporters of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 to be later named to a Republican ticket. They lost in a landslide, winning just Maine and Vermont against the Democratic ticket of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner.
During World War II, Knox again was an advocate of preparedness. As an internationalist, he supported aid to the Allies and opposed isolationism. In July 1940, he became Secretary of the Navy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, part of the Democratic president’s effort to build bi-partisan support for his foreign and defense policies following the defeat of France. Knox carried out Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Navy into a force capable of fighting in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Knox had called for the internment of Japanese Americans as early as 1933, and he continued to do so in his new position. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he visited Hawaii to investigate the sabotage he believed to have taken place there; upon his return, he issued a public statement that “the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway,” and accused Japanese Hawaiians of impeding U.S. defense efforts in a report to the President. Although the FBI and military intelligence later disproved these claims, Knox continued to push for the incarceration of Japanese Americans and barred them from service in the Navy during the war.
As the last paragraph above makes clear, Knox was no perfect model for a civilian political leader. However, his unfounded and biased prejudice against Japanese Americans does not detract from his own personal military service for his country described earlier, or his willingness to work for a political opponent for the good of the country in times of crisis.
More to the point, it speaks volumes about the quality, character, and leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, arguably one of America’s greatest crisis Presidents (Great Depression, World War II), and the only one to win election four times. A bitter political opponent called him a great man, and volunteered to aid his agenda for the good of America.
The lesson here is not the phony analogy Trump.45 would glean that Democrats should just do what he wants. Roosevelt earned respect over years from serious men and women across the political spectrum. Trump.45 can’t even keep his senior officials in line when they escape his immediate vicinity. Think Kelly, Bolton, Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, and Cohn to start. Good leadership attracts good senior executives. Trump.45’s antics send senior executive leaders running for the exits. Watch out or you might be trampled.
Summary
What to make of Trump.45’s Knock-Knock joke on America? It’s not kid stuff, and it’s not funny. Trump.45 is indeed, as Pelosi likes to gig him with repeatedly, well and truly impeached forever, no matter what his sycophants and allies pretend.
That said, if you have ever opened your mouth with a whisper against him and he learns of it, he is coming for you unleashed and unconstrained. Those standing mute on the sidelines he will get to shortly. An R affiliation after your name earns no exemption. If you doubt the vengeance crusade is coming, he has already said so.
Knock Knock America
Your First Job as Americans is to Vote on November 3, 2020
And yet…
*The respectable Grey Lady New York Times has mined the field of knock-knock jokes before, as in this piece from 1981 about William Cole.
From New York Times Metropolitan Diary on December 2, 1981 (selected):
”Knock-knock jokes are basically puns, that’s all, and you’ve got to have a feel for the ludicrous,” he says. Mr. Cole’s grasp of the ludicrous is so firm that he has perpetrated two collections of knock-knock jokes, (”Knock-Knocks You’ve Never Heard Before” and ”Knock-Knocks: The Most Ever”), with two more imminent.
The more atrocious the pun, the better the knock-knock joke, Mr. Cole maintains. Recently a friend took him to see ”A Taste of Honey,” starring Amanda Plummer. At the intermission Mr. Cole leaned over and said:
”Knock knock.” ”Who’s there?” asked the friend. ”Amanda Plummer.” ”Amanda Plummer who?” ”Amanda Plummer sent to pick up his tools.” Scarcely pausing to groan, Mr. Cole said that not long ago a little boy named Christopher asked him to sign one of his knock-knock books. ”I simply couldn’t think of a knock-knock for his name,” said Mr. Cole, ”but later it came to me.” Slow thinkers should know that the joke involves the name of an artist:
”Knock Knock.” Who’s there? ”Christopher.” Christopher who? ”Christopher goodness sake! He wants to drape Central Park!” It cannot be said that the knock-knock joke has monopolized the attention of serious historians, but some believe it to have originated during Prohibition days with the knock, knock on the speak-easy door. ”Others opine – God, what a word! – that they began with college students in the mid-1930’s,” Mr. Cole said. ”This is interesting because in 1936 there was a dreadful song, ‘Knock Knock, Who’s There?’ written by Vincent Lopez and his drummer, Johnny Morris.”
No one has ever expressed much interest in this, Mr. Cole said, but he considers the following to be his best creation: ”Knock knock.” Who’s there? ”Amaryllis.” Amaryllis who? ”Amaryllis state agent. Wanna buy a house?” Unfortunately, there is a variant, involving the word ”Amarillo”: Amarillo who? ”Amarillo-fashioned cowboy.”
As for me, I especially appreciate the blue collar plumber and his tools bit, and the Amaryllis real estate broker line, both Trump related, though written 40 years ago. His essential expertise is selling overpriced real estate to greedy buyers, and his most recent ploy is to claim he is heading a Blue Collar Boom, largely invisible to the folks wearing such collars, with respect to health care, job security, and comfortable retirement prospects.
A prescient New York advertising circular, anticipating political fortunes 100 years in the future. Donald J. Trump, In Peach Man: On the Stroll, On a Roll.
Selected Sources:
https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/the-centurys-five-greatest-presidential-landslides/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_IDdHhJRi0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Lopez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gguRFUlg1WU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Knox
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/02/garden/metropolitan-diary-114901.html