It Doesn't Make Sense

Ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha . . .

Tho' it doesn't make sense,

To the dull and the dense . . .

Ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha . . .

That's the woody woodpecker song . . .*

Kids were driving their parents crazy with it. Waitresses in jukebox joints were going frantic. The whole U.S. seemed to be gurgling itself silly with the laughing gassiness of a goofy song called Woody Woodpecker. Out only four weeks, Woody was already tops on Variety's list of the nation's most played jukebox tunes./-

The perpetrators of the latest threat to the nation's sanity are two Hollywood radio musicians--Pianist George Tibbies and Guitarist Ramey Idriss. Starting with the laugh--to the tune of the trumpet call used to round up musicians at rehearsals--they batted out both tune and lyrics in half an hour. They sang it over the phone to Producer Walter Lantz, whose animated cartoon hero Woody Woodpecker also uses the laugh, then whooshed it off to a publisher. Kay Kyser got it on wax just before James Caesar Petrillo's New Year's Eve recording ban. Tibbies and Idriss, still playing in the band on the Joan Davis show, stand to make $10,000 apiece from it.

*Copyright 1948 by Leeds Music Corp.

/- But not the first laughing song. Among earlier successes: Ticklish Reuben (circa 1910), Laughing Boy Blues.

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