Style Conversational Week 1383: Unpunning the puns For the benefit of non-fogies, the Empress explains the song title puns in Style Invitational Week 1379 Rihanna, whose 2007 “Umbrella” is one of the few 21st-century songs punned on in Style Invitational Week 1379. Rihanna, whose 2007 “Umbrella” is one of the few 21st-century songs punned on in Style Invitational Week 1379. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images) By Pat Myers May 7, 2020 at 3:43 p.m. EDT When I post the results of a Style Invitational song parody contest online — like last week’s winners for songs on “life in the Age of Corona” — I embed a link above each song to a recording of the original, so readers can listen to the melody while they read the parody lyrics, and even sing along. I should have done something similar for the results of Week 1379 — as became clear when I posted this week’s column online this morning and some of the earliest readers messaged me that they didn’t get which songs the jokes were punning on. So here you go. The contest asked for jokes whose punchline was a pun on either the title or lyric of a song, and as with many Style Invitational contests involving music, most of the entries alluded to songs of an earlier time — often several decades back into the previous millennium, which happens, amazingly, to coincide with the years that the Empress did most of her song memorization. She did, however, include a few songs of somewhat recent vintage, only to find that her predecessor, The Czar, had never heard — or heard of — “Old Town Road,” a song that headed last year’s Top 40 for 19 straight weeks. AD ADVERTISING So here’s the answer key. Don’t consider your personal intelligence insulted. The Lose Cannon winner, by Chris Doyle: buzzed in flattened Baton Rouge waitin’ for a crane. That’s a play on busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train, the first line of “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson and made famous by Janis Joplin when her recording was released in 1971, shortly after her death. Chris mentioned “McGee’s” as the cannabis shop that falls on the trapped couple. (Link to audio.) This is the fifty-ninth win for The Style Invitational’s most inking Loser. And his four blots of ink this week give him an unfathomable total of 2,216. 2. Ken Liss’s tale of an allergic paranoid convinced that Ranger ops keep pollen on my head: That’s Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, the first No. 1 song of the 1970s. Written by the great Burt Bacharach and Hal David as theme music for the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and recorded by country singer B.J. Thomas, who robs the song of its jazz qualities. (This is, by the way, only the second blot of Invite ink ever for Ken Liss -- so, since he won the Fir Stink air freshener for his First Ink back in Week 1337, and a tiny electronic screaming goat this time for second place, Ken has yet to win a Loser magnet. Keep trying, Ken!) AD 3. Yay, the 21st century: Michelle Christophorou’s ode to an overly sun-tanned wife, that “there’s no place better than under my umber Ella,” plays off the line You can stand under my umbrella in the 2007 song “Umbrella” by Rihanna. (Video clip here at the relevant point) 4. Hildy Zampella, who was a runner-up last week with her parody of “I Hope You Dance,” ends her tale of an NFL referee who takes his job home with him with the exasperated plea "You don’t have to live like a ref, Eugene” as in You don’t have to live like a refugee, from the 1980 song “Refugee” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. (Video at the money spot.) As do some of this week’s inking entries, John Glenn (no) sets up his shaggy-dog joke with a reference to the song’s performer, in a totally fictitious anecdote about Brian Wilson as a prizewinning omelet maker: “I’m picking up goodbye rations; she’s giving me egg citations.” As in I’m picking up good vibrations; she’s giving me excitations from the Beach Boys’ best song, “Good Vibrations” from 1966. AD Kevin Dopart uses another totally bogus anecdote, about a mishap involving cases of beer at a Bruce Springsteen concert, to cue Blonde Dead by the Light, in honor of Springsteen’s 1973 song Blinded by the Light, from his very first album. (The chorus, which Bruce takes forever to get to.) What do you call the evening when Dick Cheney retired and the Secret Service escorted him to an undisclosed location in Florida? The night they drove old Dick C down. Alex Steelsmith on The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, a 1969 song by J. Robbie Robertson of The Band and a hit for Joan Baez in 1971 — surely the protest singer’s only song that sympathizes with a Southerner in the Civil War. Ward Kay got the week’s seemingly obligatory jab at the Trumpian Tanning Bed with He can’t read my ocher face.” as in He can’t read my poker face, in Lady Gaga’s 2008 “Poker Face.” AD What did Joan Jett call her private Pacific atoll? Isle of Rock and Roll. (Duncan Stevens) Joan Jett, who spent her teen years in the D.C. suburb of Rockville, Md., had her biggest hit with a cover of I Love Rock and Roll in 1982. Steve Smith’s chimp-walks-into-a-bar joke ends with “I’m her ape, old man! I’m Henry” plays off I’m her eighth old man, I’m 'Enery,” the next-to-last line of the one-verse Henry VIII, I Am, a 1910 British music hall novelty song that was a 1965 hit for British Invasion moptops Herman’s Hermits in America (but wasn’t released in the U.K.). Jerry Birchmore’s lament for missing square dancing during the pandemic, It’s the end of the whirls as we know it, references It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine), the 1987 R.E.M. song. Sam Mertens’s groaner “The ants are. My friend is blowin’ in the wind” — okay, that one I’m not doing. AD Also Lawrence McGuire’s “You can’t always get what you wand.” It fell to Frank Osen, born in 1954, to get ink with a reference to the only non-oldie in the bunch with an admittedly tortured fish story: “I’m gonna toss my hake to the old round toad” is a spooneristic take on I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road, the first line of “Old Town Road,” the runaway hit of 2019. There was plenty of “Man of La Mancha” setup to place Alex Steelsmith’s To march into hell for a heavenly clause into the context of “The Impossible Dream.” To march into hell for a heavenly cause is Joe Darion’s great line from the song in which Don Quixote tells of his, well, quixotic quest. Kevin Dopart set up his joke with “sand and hills and rocks and things,” another line from A Horse With No Name, the 1971 song by the band America that’s been called a description of taking heroin by someone who’s never taken heroin — to A course with yo’ name. AD Jonathan Jensen uses the name of a real restaurant, the famed Hyman’s Seafood in Charleston, S.C., to lend credence to his otherwise bogus story about Lucille Ball ending with “Lucy’s in disguise at Hyman’s!” which has no other connection to the 1967 Beatles song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. What did Jerry Lee Lewis say after reading the president’s Twitter feed? “Goodness gracious, great bawls of ire!” Jesse Frankovich on, duh, Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, from Lewis’s 1957 rock-'n’-roller. Jeff Shirley turned 42 bottles of beer on the wall, 42 bottles of beer — from about 57 verses into “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” as an inspirational call to defend the nation’s capital from the British in 1814, Fortitude battles our fear on the Mall. Fortitude battles our fear. Chris Doyle put Carrie Underwood and her real-life sister Shanna into an Italian restaurant to have Carrie plead, “Gee, sis, take the veal!” as a play on Underwood’s 2005 song Jesus Take the Wheel. AD Sarah Walsh, on the other hand, went far afield from “My Fair Lady” with her story on searching for oil fields with “Just Kuwait, when we dig in, just Kuwait” as in Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait, from Eliza Doolittle’s revenge-fantasy song for her unbearable mentor. In the category of puns that just revel in their absurdity, Duncan Stevens got ink with a ridiculous list of chores — “Parse lease. Aid Roes. Marry in time” — to pun on the refrain “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” from Simon and Garfunkel’s setting of the folk song “Scarborough Fair.” (See below for an even more ridiculous entry from Duncan.) Chris Doyle’s fake anecdote about Brit Hume — actually from D.C. and not Hoboken, N.J. — got him to How Can Hume End Hoboken Art? with no other connection to the horrible 1971 hit by the Bee Gees How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. AD I had no idea that Broadway musical star Joanna Gleason was the daughter of “Let’s Make a Deal” host Monty Hall until I checked out Elliott Shevin’s story bringing him to the tortured pun from the Monty Halls of Zumba: the two shoes of triple-A, evoking the first line of the Marines’ Hymn, From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Bruce Springsteen will no doubt be pleased to get a second song this week, with Eric Nelkin’s burnin’ the ewe essay, a groaner on Born in the USA. Jesse Rifkin also voyaged into Absurdland with the fun of watching “digital videos of cardiovascular surgeries” so he could do Total e-clips of the heart, a play on the 1983 Bonnie Tyler song. Jesse, who regularly teases the Empress and Losers about their ancient vintage, was born a decade after this song. Mark Raffman worked hard to avoid not to use the words in the punchline for his setup to chest nuts boasting in an old Penn flier, in an anecdote that didn’t otherwise relate to Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the opening line of “The Christmas Song,” the 1945, uh, chestnut by (Jewish) Mel Torme. Why did the White House communications aide say he couldn’t take it anymore? “Every day it’s endless schemes and secret threats of MAGA scenes.” Chris Doyle plays on the opening of the second verse of “Homeward Bound” by Simon and Garfunkel: Every day’s an endless stream of cigarette and magazines. And last: What did the Empress say after staying up until 3 a.m. reading Invite entries? “It’s been a har-daze night.” (Jesse Frankovich) Beverley Sharp brought back “My Fair Lady” to get in the last word this week, with the exasperated Empress on chewing out the Losers: “I groaned and cussed ’em to their face.” That’s a nod to Henry Higgins’s admission that maybe he kind of likes Eliza after all, I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face. --- Yeah, some of these puns were a bit of a stretch — as in Mrs. Incredible is a bit of a stretch — but nowhere a much as many of the non-inking entries were this week. There was “this is dedicated to the one olive,” as in “the one I love.” There was “The Vaccine’s More Grim,” whose writer explained was a pun on “The Marine Corps Hymn.” There was “Don’t hold me closer, tiny distancer.” But for the ultimate in contrivance, I offer you this one by Duncan Stevens: President Lincoln and Pat Myers (who had seen better times) met up at Mr. T’s cafe with bottles of Gatorade. The waiter was offended, and informed them loudly that he’d urinated in the teapot. Stricken, they beseeched the owner to help them, but he demanded a painting of the ultraviolet spectrum, laundry detergent, a sheep, an omelet and a bottle of Bordeaux. Emile Zola recorded these events: Abie, seedy E have G. ‘Eh, chai, Jake? ‘K?’ Yell: ‘Um, an’ a pee.’ ‘Cure us, T!” “UV daub, All, ewe, eggs, wine.”—Z. Okay, that’s enough for today. If you’re unfamiliar with our Questionable Journalism contests and are thinking of entering this week’s contest, Week 1383, take a look (no paywall) on the special “Questions” page of the Master Contest List at NRARS.org. Click on any of the QJ contests — the links to the results are on the right side of the row — to see text files of earlier results. Or just look at our Losers’ Circle from February 2019: Fourth place: Sentence in a Post story: She suggests keeping 12, and her preference is for all matching mugs for a calmer look. Question it might answer: How does Marie Kondo recommend that police departments organize their “Most Wanted” posters? (Steve Honley) Third place: Post story: A cloud can amplify global warming, or it can limit it, depending on what kind of cloud it is, and its size, location, thickness, duration, etc. Q: How did the first draft of “Both Sides Now” start? (Duncan Stevens) Second place: A. Tip-off is 7 p.m. Q. So you think the Mueller report is going to be leaked? (Drew Bennett) And the winner of the Lose Cannon: A. “I was tasked with the job of stopping the run and I do take pride in that.” Q. So, Mr. Putin, you admit sabotaging the Clinton campaign? (Beverley Sharp) Meanwhile, keep sending in those “foal” names for Week 1382 -- you have till midnight (wherever you are) Monday, May 11. I already have lots 'n' lots!