"I Wanna Hold You Gland" : The Goonish Absurd in Beatles Wit and Culture
I am posting this because 1) it took me a long time and 2) it is an awesome paper, as far as I know.
It is late, so I don't know it is an awesome paper. Thankfully, the due date tomorrow is chiefly for peer reviewing.
Holla atcha Beatles papas!
By 1964 Beatlemania had literally reached a deafening climax. Indeed, each time a Beatle got off a plane, opened a car door, waved from a hotel window, or scratched his nose he was met with riotous response. During concerts, it didn't matter what they were playing or singing because no one could hear them over the decibel-topping roar. Lennon recognized the absurd in this and used concerts as an opportunity to alter traditional lyrics. Such occasions reveal a new Anglicized sense of absurdity and irreverence, one that would become a hallmark of Beatles cheek. During one particularly loud concert, "I wanna hold your hand" is rumored to have suffered an unfortunate anatomical shift by Lennon, becoming instead "I wanna hold your gland." Quoted by Steven Stark, Hesketh Peterson wrote in The English Genius of civilized British humor: “Our true patron saint is not St. George but Sir John Falstaff” (106). Indeed, this cheeky anglo-wit can be chronicled across generations, including the likes of Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. However, the new flavor of the irreverent is most palatable and perhaps most imitable to early British rockers in the radio broadcast known as The Goon Show. The combination of radio gimmick and cultural mimicry utilized in Goon Show theatrics provides an essentially rebellious notion of absurdity, one that would characterize the rabid success of the Beatles' arrival in 1960s America.
The Goon Show, composed of the irreverent antics of the three (originally four) English comedians Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers (Milligan). The tenor of Goon Show behavior was one of whimsical cheek. Under these strictures, traditional performance conventions were not only nonbinding, they were openly disregarded. Part of the appeal of a radio program like the Goon Show was a tendency to turn stereotype into comic social commentary. In particular, this tactic was sometimes used to poke fun at the absurd nature of the relationship between radio performer and radio audience. This relationship, traditionally unacknowledged by the trying-to-please performer, is flatly mocked by the Goons. This attitude of comic nonchalance was later adopted in the Beatles’ stage show. Their nonconventional stage mannerisms seem to take on a Goonish quality, as Brian Epstein notes “I had never seen anything like the Beatles on any stage… they smoked as they played and they talked and pretended to hit one another. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes” (Gould 115). When we examine Goon Show scripts we find the same sense of intentional performer-audience awareness and unselfconsciousness that quite possibly turned into Beatles stage direction.
In a Goon Show episode titled "The Fireball of Milton Street" a character named Seagoon, played by Harry Secombe, is running to London to warn the Queen of impending calamity. Part of this journey requires the scaling of a number of very wide English rivers. The first two are dramatically hurtled over, but soon the intrepid Seagoon reaches a third. The script reads as such from Seagoon's description: "So then, then I came to a very wide raging torrent. I ran as fast as I could, I jumped - [ stop] - Right! Hands up all those who thought I was going to fall in the river… Come on, hands up! Right! Take a hundred lines: 'I must not try and guess the end of Goon Show gags'" (The Goon Show). This scene cleverly anticipates the anticipation of the audience. It acknowledges its own absurdity in relying on predictable plot outlines and at the same time acknowledges that the audience is clever enough to pick up on this reliance. This identifies such absurdist humor as communal. To upend traditional constructs is to be part of the collective, to essentially be one of the Goons.
Such an inclusion is not soley comic; it also brings a new sense of intimacy and camaraderie within the realm of both Goon and Beatles fandom alike. In Can't Buy Me Love Jonathan Gould explains the cultish appeal of Goonery: "Goon humor was cult homor, and the essential principle of cult humor can be stated as follows: The more obscure the joke, the greater the intimacy that comes from sharing in it" (50). This flagrant acknowledgment of not only their awareness of their own absurdity but of the audience's awareness of that absurdity would prove a key binding force between Goonians. John Lennon would later admit the effect such a show had on his own adolescence: "I was 12 when The Goon Show first hit me, 16 when they finished with me. Their humour was the only proof that the world was insane" (Lennon). These words show how deep-rooted Goon humor was for Lennon. One would expect him to say Goon humor was the only proof that the world was sane, yet Lennon upends this common usage, proving the longevity of their particular brand of insanity on the cultural psyche of its fans. This humor would later manifest itself in not only Beatle banter, but Beatle music as well - infusing each expression of Beatle-ness with a semi-sacreligious flavor of wit and whimsy.
The Beatles would borrow these spectacular devices in their own staged productions and conferences. The Beatles recognized the performance aspect in their very existence and location in time. In a U.S. press conference in 1964, the Beatles surprised the world by likewise turning the performer-spectator tables. One reporter asked, “How does it feel to be putting on the whole world?” John’s reply was, “How does it feel to be put on?” (Greenwald 8). Examples of this particular strain of humor can be found even in later Beatles recordings. On the “Let it Be” album released in 1970, Lennon rambles an almost incoherent introduction to the song “Dig a Pony” in a starkly Goonish jumble of nonsense words: “I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hortrey and the Deaf Aids, Phase One in which Doris gets her oats” (The Beatles). This string of nonsensical descriptors mirrors introductions given by the Goon Show cast. One such instance appears in “Foiled by President Fred” wherein the show begins with a frantic cacophony of orchestral sound and its cheeky announcer:
Orchestra:[Crashing descending chords]
Milligan: Hear that sound, listeners? Ha ha.
Seagoon:Yes, we can all hear it - Bach's Tocata and Fugue - by Batch. Written especially for Reg Dixon and his Blackpool Tower. It was that music that meed me mooned to tik up the organ - but that started many years ago in the Rhonda Valley bach (137).
This deliberate “putting on” of the audience acknowledges the artificiality and spectacle of sound recording. In his article “The Spectacle of Alienation” William Northcutt describes this act as creating “a space apart from reality, outside the very spectacle [Lennon] was creating” (142). It may be argued that this acknowledgment is alienating. It seems to remove one chunk of the kaleidoscope - leaving in its place a clunky toy which, rather than continually reflecting inward - fully contained inside itself, notices its own incomplete artificiality and bleeds into the outside world.
This acknowledgement and subsequent artist/production alienation would work itself upon audiences of both Goonery and Beatles alike if it were conducted more seriously. Instead, the blatant humor and obvious ridiculousness of these introductions include the audience in the recognition of artificiality, creating instead a club of those who ‘know’ that sound recordings contain some level of farce in their very production. In his work, The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank describes the new irony of producer-consumer relationships in the 1960s. In this new era of advertising, consumers had to be “extraordinarily cynical and savvy about advertising” after so much of the sensational artificiality presented in the fifties, these buyers were “responsive only to clever pitches that shared their skepticism about mass society”(233). Frank later recalls the quaint observation of market researcher Judith Langer who wrote that new consumers respond best to ironic messages; “advertising that is funny and hip and says, ‘Hey, we know’” (234). In the same way that advertisers looked distrustingly upon earlier renditions of their art, noticing its artificiality, so did the Goons and the Beatles. In their babblings, they were effectively nodding to their audience, “Hey, we know.” Their self-promotion through wordy nonsense became part of the wit that informed the Beatles’ presence in the art of sound recording.
Part of this wit was a collective embrace of classic English wordplay. This game of sounds and meanings made an effective mockery of traditional language usage. This was a common convention of Goon humor, and one later mimicked in the Beatles repartee with the American press. Though the following dialogue occurs in 1972, well after the Beatles' American invasion, this excerpt carefully preserves the type of wordplay that the Goons would have employed in their BBC broadcasts in a way that makes it easy to trace the origins of the particularly shrewd humor of the Beatles. In a press conference covering the release of new Goon material, one ambitious interviewer from The Times asked what the show was about. Unable to receive a satisfactory answer, the reporter posed a more specific question:
Reporter: What's the plot?
Secombe: We've never had a plot.
Milligan: I've got a plot, it's in Golders Green crematorium (Waymark).
This transposition of sound and meaning is exactly the type of humor that would later toss the Beatles into the public eye.
Indeed, it wouldn’t take long for this flavor of linguistic punnery to surface in the Beatles own public conversation. In an interview conducted by Geoffrey Giuliano during a press conference in San Francisco August 19, 1964, Giuliano mentions a local petition to have Ringo elected president. This interview employs the same transposition of sound and meaning earlier conducted in Goon radio plays. After a rallying response from the other Beatles, Giuliano questions Ringo only to be met with some of their characteristic wordplay:
Question: Would you make them part of your cabinet?
Ringo: I’d have to, wouldn’t I?
George: I could be the door.
Ringo: I’d have George as the treasurer.
John: I could be the cupboard (31).
Imbedded in language is a subtle jab at the cultural constructs of interpersonal interaction - in this case, the interaction between performer and press. In a typical question and answer setting, the content of the interview is under the chief control of the questioner. This attention to wordplay flips this social convention, comically disarming the questioner in favor of a more commanding flippancy. Such a tactic not only disarms the individual questioner, it attacks the convention of social control in general. Any situation where one party is asserting control or authority over another can easily be manipulated by this new irreverence for language. In this way, the Goons provided a precedent of upending conventional authority. Thus, when critics mark the ingenuity of early Beatles cheek, they are actually paying homage to the linguistic manipulation of their Goonian predecessors.
This linguistic irreverence carries with it a sense of disregard for socio-cultural constructs. A comedy troupe born out of the receding aftermath of World War II, the players on The Goon Show were constantly acknowledging traditional Britannia with a somewhat mocking tip of the hat in each production (Wilmut 22). Stark borrows this quote from satiric playwritght James Miller in reference to such Goonish social commentary: “The Goons did an enormous amount to subvert the social order … After all, half The Goon Show is a send-up of British Imperialism” (107). Among its recurring characters are Major Denis Bloodnok, Ind. Arm. Rtd., whose epithet is “Military idiot, coward and bar” and Neddie Seagoon, called the “true blue British idiot and hero as always” (Milligan 14-15). Here, the British heroes are the idiots of the international playing field. Much of the time they are either caught up in their own personal stupidities, or they are bounding about the world wreaking politically incorrect havoc upon all nations. In the show “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler” the help of Ned Seagoon is solicited in tracking down the dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill. His investigations take him to North Africa where he continues his case with characteristic thoroughness. There he meets foreign investigator Grytpype-Thyne. They exchange the following:
Grytpype: Inspector Seagoon, my name is Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, Special Investigation. This Batter Pudding Hurler...
Seagoon: Yes?
Grytpype: He's made a fool of the police.
Seagoon:I disagree, we were fools long before he came along (Milligan 26).
This blatant subversion of authoritative Britannia signaled a new age of socio-cultural irreverence. In this comic climate, The Goon Show sets an airwave precedence in mocking respected public figures.
It’s true most of the main characters have either political or military ties - though none of them reputable. Major Bloodnok is known for being “cashiered [fired] for the 7th time - a world military record” (Milligan 15). Even real-life politicians were not immune to the Goons’ social irreverence. “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest” is described by Roger Wilmut in The Goon Show Companion as “the show in which [Peter] Sellers’s famous impersonations of Sir Winston Churchill finally became too much for the BBC” after they portrayed the Prime Minister bungling under the table, searching for some “blasted telegram.” Wilmut continues: “The BBC banned any further impressions of this sort” (60). It wasn’t so much that The Goon Show revolutionized social commentary. For ages satiric writers and illustrators had laid casual hands to unflattering representations of British aristocracy. However, this was the first time social critics had the responsibility to make light of the constructs necessarily erected for World War II. In this case, it wasn’t the atrocities that were laughable, but instead the caricatured leaders whose imperfections championed the British identity. The world wasn’t so chaotic and war-torn that the British elite couldn’t stomach a laugh at themselves. Especially a laugh they needed so dearly.
The Beatles flounced a similar irreverence for socio-cultural precedent. In response to their 1965 Buckingham visit, Paul remarked, “It’s a keen pad. The Queen? She was just like a mum to us” (Stokes 158). There, the Beatles had just been made Members of the British Empire. With a few inert phrases the Beatles turned a traditionally sober ceremony into just another teenage hangout. This attitude showed Brits and Americans alike that nothing was too serious after all. Not even Buckingham Palace and its housed queen - a paradigm of stoicism, the product of hard wartime labor - were omitted from the easy comical foray of Beatles’ wit. John Lennon’s classic “rattle your jewelry” remark did little to truly rattle anybody. Spitz notes in The Beatles: The Biography that “it wasn’t disrespectful … or scandalous… but it certainly wasn’t anything one expected to hear out of a loyal British subject” (434).
In another characteristic sending up of social flares, Lennon purchased a Rolls-Royce Phantom V Chassis 5VD73 for £11,000 in 1965 (Giuliano 97). At the time, such a purchase was not uncommon for the morbidly wealthy. Reproduced in Plate 1 is a collection of Rolls-Royce/Bentley owners’ manuals and booklets from 1965, albeit reprinted in 1975. Included here is a booklet entitled “What A Good Chauffeur Should Know” and a short book entitled “Rolls-Royce and Bentley Sales Literature” which, according to the auction it was listed under, “provides a checklist of all known factory issued brochures from both marques in chronological order” (Four … Reprints). The fact that a car came with a library of richly ensconced reading material (part of which was meant not for chauffeurs merely, but for ‘good’ chauffeurs) suggests that the average Rolls-Roycer was not your nine-to-five Mr. Smith. This car was intended for a select cache of big spenders - individuals whose cars in fact require supplemental reading, despite the fact that they may never actually read what’s inside.
Lennon’s millions made him part of that cash-tossing collective. In her book, A Twist of Lennon, Cynthia Lennon recounts her ability to give in to a particularly tempting disposition of consumerism during the first American tour: “I felt the urge to spend some dollars. I was in a frivolous money-spending mood. In the lobby of the hotel was housed a boutique and I couldn’t resist the temptation” (121). The Rolls-Royce purchase would have been characteristic of someone with a Beatles-size bank account. What Lennon did next upended that traditional British elitism. Cynthia continues: "During the making of Sergeant Pepper John decided to have the Rolls-Royce painted. Colour and design were of the utmost priority and he employed a firm of barge and caravan designers to do it for him" (142). The paint job can be viewed here in Plate 2. This was something next to public scandal to the bowler-hat-topped Rolls-Royceans of Great Britain. Among a collection of anecdotes surrounding Lennon’s flower-glazed vehicle, one website relates a supposed reaction in 1967: “John’s newly painted psychedelic car drew some public outrage when an old woman, in London’s downtown, attacked the car using her umbrella and yelling: ‘You swine, you swine! How dare you do this to a Rolls-Royce!’” (Whelan). Such a reaction reflects the deep-seated value of social symbols in British culture even in the 1960s. The Beatles’ irreverence was only fanned by such responses. In a statement made to The Rolling Stone, Lennon responds to the question of whether or not the Beatles have been spoiled by success: “Well, you don’t see us running around in bowler hats, do you?” (196).
Examining the popular comic eccentricities of Goon humor, it is easy to picture the Beatles’ entry into the American culture scene as one marked by pointed wit and almost lyric whimsy. The influence of Goonery and absurd humor ultimately transcends national boundaries. In an article published in 1958 by the Radio Times, politician Michael Foot noted, "the fact that the Goons are so popular is one of my hopes for the British public… I'd like to think they'll last another hundred years!" (Pedrick). The humor that is uniquely Goonish is preserved transcontinentally in the humor of the Beatles. John Lennon recounts, “ We were the sons of The Goon Show … We were of an age. We were the extension of that rebellion in a way” (Stark 108). It is found in the unselfconscious tenor of Beatles stage presence, the unabashed cheek of press interviews, and the comic linguistic fluidity of personal interaction. In a Hollywood interview, Giuliano posed a heated question concerning the lyric interpretations of several popular Beatles tunes. According to Time magazine, “Day Tripper” was the story of a prostitute and “Norwegian Wood” was about a lesbian. He asked, “I want to know what your intent was when you wrote them and what your feeling is about Time’s criticism of the music that is being written today?” George responded with characteristic unaffectedness: “We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians. That’s all” (Guiliano 86). The Beatles’ Goonish humor seemed to be tapping society’s shoulder only to hide itself on the other side. It was in an engaging nonchalance, a flippant disregard for social constructs that the Beatles informed society its own comical absurdities. The Beatles’ comic influence both shocked and teased nations out of their social seriousness. All the Beatles really wanted was to subvert traditional social tropes and to hold as many glands as they could, that’s all.
Plate 1:
(Four… Reprints).
Plate 2:
Photo by Becca Lee Jensen, taken at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada December 2004
Works Cited
"Four Bentley and Rolls-Royce Historic Reprints." L'Art Et L'Automobile. 9 Apr. 2008 .
Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1997. 234-235.
Gould, Jonathan. Can't Buy Me Love. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.
Geoffrey, Giuliano, and Brenda Guiliano, comps. The Lost Beatles Interviews. New York: Penguin Group, 1994.
Greenwald, Ted. The Beatles Companion: the Fab Four in Film, Performance, Recording, and Print. New York: Smithmark, 1992.
Lennon, John. Book Review: “The Goon Show Scripts." New York Times. 30 Sep 1973. 13 February 2008.
Milligan, Spike. The Goon Show scripts, written and selected by Spike Milligan. With
drawings by Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe [and] Spike Milligan. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1972.
“Foiled by President Fred.”
“The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler”
“The Mighty Wurlitzer.”
Northcutt, William M. "The Spectacle of Alienation: Death, Loss, and the Crowd in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band." Reading the Beatles. Ed. Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis. New York: State University of New York P, 2006. 129-146.
Pedrick, Gale. “The Goons - as others see them." Radio Times [London]. 31 Oct 1958.
Sella, Marshall. "The Lives They Lived: Insanely Funny." New York Times. 29 Dec
2002. 3 Feb 2008. .
Spitz, Bob. The Beatles: the Biography. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2005.
Stark, Steven D. Meet the Beatles. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Stokes, Geoffrey. The Beatles: the Rolling Stones Press Book. New York: Times Books, 1980.
The Beatles. "Dig a Pony." By John Lennon. Rec. 8 May 1970. Let It Be. Capitol, 1970.
The Goon Show. Harry Secombe. BBC, London. 22 Feb 1955.
"The Fireball of Milton Street."
“Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest.”
Waymark, Peter. "Goons let loose on air again." Times [London].1 May 1972.
Whelan, John. "Some Interesting Facts About John Lennon's Rolls-Royce Phantom V. Chassis 5VD73." Ottawa Beatles Site. 13 Feb. 2000. Ottawa Museum of Science and Technology. 9 Apr. 2008 .
Wilmut, Roger, and Jimmy Grafton. The Goon Show Companion: a History and Goonography. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1978.
It is late, so I don't know it is an awesome paper. Thankfully, the due date tomorrow is chiefly for peer reviewing.
Holla atcha Beatles papas!
By 1964 Beatlemania had literally reached a deafening climax. Indeed, each time a Beatle got off a plane, opened a car door, waved from a hotel window, or scratched his nose he was met with riotous response. During concerts, it didn't matter what they were playing or singing because no one could hear them over the decibel-topping roar. Lennon recognized the absurd in this and used concerts as an opportunity to alter traditional lyrics. Such occasions reveal a new Anglicized sense of absurdity and irreverence, one that would become a hallmark of Beatles cheek. During one particularly loud concert, "I wanna hold your hand" is rumored to have suffered an unfortunate anatomical shift by Lennon, becoming instead "I wanna hold your gland." Quoted by Steven Stark, Hesketh Peterson wrote in The English Genius of civilized British humor: “Our true patron saint is not St. George but Sir John Falstaff” (106). Indeed, this cheeky anglo-wit can be chronicled across generations, including the likes of Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde. However, the new flavor of the irreverent is most palatable and perhaps most imitable to early British rockers in the radio broadcast known as The Goon Show. The combination of radio gimmick and cultural mimicry utilized in Goon Show theatrics provides an essentially rebellious notion of absurdity, one that would characterize the rabid success of the Beatles' arrival in 1960s America.
The Goon Show, composed of the irreverent antics of the three (originally four) English comedians Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers (Milligan). The tenor of Goon Show behavior was one of whimsical cheek. Under these strictures, traditional performance conventions were not only nonbinding, they were openly disregarded. Part of the appeal of a radio program like the Goon Show was a tendency to turn stereotype into comic social commentary. In particular, this tactic was sometimes used to poke fun at the absurd nature of the relationship between radio performer and radio audience. This relationship, traditionally unacknowledged by the trying-to-please performer, is flatly mocked by the Goons. This attitude of comic nonchalance was later adopted in the Beatles’ stage show. Their nonconventional stage mannerisms seem to take on a Goonish quality, as Brian Epstein notes “I had never seen anything like the Beatles on any stage… they smoked as they played and they talked and pretended to hit one another. They turned their backs on the audience and shouted at them and laughed at private jokes” (Gould 115). When we examine Goon Show scripts we find the same sense of intentional performer-audience awareness and unselfconsciousness that quite possibly turned into Beatles stage direction.
In a Goon Show episode titled "The Fireball of Milton Street" a character named Seagoon, played by Harry Secombe, is running to London to warn the Queen of impending calamity. Part of this journey requires the scaling of a number of very wide English rivers. The first two are dramatically hurtled over, but soon the intrepid Seagoon reaches a third. The script reads as such from Seagoon's description: "So then, then I came to a very wide raging torrent. I ran as fast as I could, I jumped - [ stop] - Right! Hands up all those who thought I was going to fall in the river… Come on, hands up! Right! Take a hundred lines: 'I must not try and guess the end of Goon Show gags'" (The Goon Show). This scene cleverly anticipates the anticipation of the audience. It acknowledges its own absurdity in relying on predictable plot outlines and at the same time acknowledges that the audience is clever enough to pick up on this reliance. This identifies such absurdist humor as communal. To upend traditional constructs is to be part of the collective, to essentially be one of the Goons.
Such an inclusion is not soley comic; it also brings a new sense of intimacy and camaraderie within the realm of both Goon and Beatles fandom alike. In Can't Buy Me Love Jonathan Gould explains the cultish appeal of Goonery: "Goon humor was cult homor, and the essential principle of cult humor can be stated as follows: The more obscure the joke, the greater the intimacy that comes from sharing in it" (50). This flagrant acknowledgment of not only their awareness of their own absurdity but of the audience's awareness of that absurdity would prove a key binding force between Goonians. John Lennon would later admit the effect such a show had on his own adolescence: "I was 12 when The Goon Show first hit me, 16 when they finished with me. Their humour was the only proof that the world was insane" (Lennon). These words show how deep-rooted Goon humor was for Lennon. One would expect him to say Goon humor was the only proof that the world was sane, yet Lennon upends this common usage, proving the longevity of their particular brand of insanity on the cultural psyche of its fans. This humor would later manifest itself in not only Beatle banter, but Beatle music as well - infusing each expression of Beatle-ness with a semi-sacreligious flavor of wit and whimsy.
The Beatles would borrow these spectacular devices in their own staged productions and conferences. The Beatles recognized the performance aspect in their very existence and location in time. In a U.S. press conference in 1964, the Beatles surprised the world by likewise turning the performer-spectator tables. One reporter asked, “How does it feel to be putting on the whole world?” John’s reply was, “How does it feel to be put on?” (Greenwald 8). Examples of this particular strain of humor can be found even in later Beatles recordings. On the “Let it Be” album released in 1970, Lennon rambles an almost incoherent introduction to the song “Dig a Pony” in a starkly Goonish jumble of nonsense words: “I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hortrey and the Deaf Aids, Phase One in which Doris gets her oats” (The Beatles). This string of nonsensical descriptors mirrors introductions given by the Goon Show cast. One such instance appears in “Foiled by President Fred” wherein the show begins with a frantic cacophony of orchestral sound and its cheeky announcer:
Orchestra:[Crashing descending chords]
Milligan: Hear that sound, listeners? Ha ha.
Seagoon:Yes, we can all hear it - Bach's Tocata and Fugue - by Batch. Written especially for Reg Dixon and his Blackpool Tower. It was that music that meed me mooned to tik up the organ - but that started many years ago in the Rhonda Valley bach (137).
This deliberate “putting on” of the audience acknowledges the artificiality and spectacle of sound recording. In his article “The Spectacle of Alienation” William Northcutt describes this act as creating “a space apart from reality, outside the very spectacle [Lennon] was creating” (142). It may be argued that this acknowledgment is alienating. It seems to remove one chunk of the kaleidoscope - leaving in its place a clunky toy which, rather than continually reflecting inward - fully contained inside itself, notices its own incomplete artificiality and bleeds into the outside world.
This acknowledgement and subsequent artist/production alienation would work itself upon audiences of both Goonery and Beatles alike if it were conducted more seriously. Instead, the blatant humor and obvious ridiculousness of these introductions include the audience in the recognition of artificiality, creating instead a club of those who ‘know’ that sound recordings contain some level of farce in their very production. In his work, The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank describes the new irony of producer-consumer relationships in the 1960s. In this new era of advertising, consumers had to be “extraordinarily cynical and savvy about advertising” after so much of the sensational artificiality presented in the fifties, these buyers were “responsive only to clever pitches that shared their skepticism about mass society”(233). Frank later recalls the quaint observation of market researcher Judith Langer who wrote that new consumers respond best to ironic messages; “advertising that is funny and hip and says, ‘Hey, we know’” (234). In the same way that advertisers looked distrustingly upon earlier renditions of their art, noticing its artificiality, so did the Goons and the Beatles. In their babblings, they were effectively nodding to their audience, “Hey, we know.” Their self-promotion through wordy nonsense became part of the wit that informed the Beatles’ presence in the art of sound recording.
Part of this wit was a collective embrace of classic English wordplay. This game of sounds and meanings made an effective mockery of traditional language usage. This was a common convention of Goon humor, and one later mimicked in the Beatles repartee with the American press. Though the following dialogue occurs in 1972, well after the Beatles' American invasion, this excerpt carefully preserves the type of wordplay that the Goons would have employed in their BBC broadcasts in a way that makes it easy to trace the origins of the particularly shrewd humor of the Beatles. In a press conference covering the release of new Goon material, one ambitious interviewer from The Times asked what the show was about. Unable to receive a satisfactory answer, the reporter posed a more specific question:
Reporter: What's the plot?
Secombe: We've never had a plot.
Milligan: I've got a plot, it's in Golders Green crematorium (Waymark).
This transposition of sound and meaning is exactly the type of humor that would later toss the Beatles into the public eye.
Indeed, it wouldn’t take long for this flavor of linguistic punnery to surface in the Beatles own public conversation. In an interview conducted by Geoffrey Giuliano during a press conference in San Francisco August 19, 1964, Giuliano mentions a local petition to have Ringo elected president. This interview employs the same transposition of sound and meaning earlier conducted in Goon radio plays. After a rallying response from the other Beatles, Giuliano questions Ringo only to be met with some of their characteristic wordplay:
Question: Would you make them part of your cabinet?
Ringo: I’d have to, wouldn’t I?
George: I could be the door.
Ringo: I’d have George as the treasurer.
John: I could be the cupboard (31).
Imbedded in language is a subtle jab at the cultural constructs of interpersonal interaction - in this case, the interaction between performer and press. In a typical question and answer setting, the content of the interview is under the chief control of the questioner. This attention to wordplay flips this social convention, comically disarming the questioner in favor of a more commanding flippancy. Such a tactic not only disarms the individual questioner, it attacks the convention of social control in general. Any situation where one party is asserting control or authority over another can easily be manipulated by this new irreverence for language. In this way, the Goons provided a precedent of upending conventional authority. Thus, when critics mark the ingenuity of early Beatles cheek, they are actually paying homage to the linguistic manipulation of their Goonian predecessors.
This linguistic irreverence carries with it a sense of disregard for socio-cultural constructs. A comedy troupe born out of the receding aftermath of World War II, the players on The Goon Show were constantly acknowledging traditional Britannia with a somewhat mocking tip of the hat in each production (Wilmut 22). Stark borrows this quote from satiric playwritght James Miller in reference to such Goonish social commentary: “The Goons did an enormous amount to subvert the social order … After all, half The Goon Show is a send-up of British Imperialism” (107). Among its recurring characters are Major Denis Bloodnok, Ind. Arm. Rtd., whose epithet is “Military idiot, coward and bar” and Neddie Seagoon, called the “true blue British idiot and hero as always” (Milligan 14-15). Here, the British heroes are the idiots of the international playing field. Much of the time they are either caught up in their own personal stupidities, or they are bounding about the world wreaking politically incorrect havoc upon all nations. In the show “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler” the help of Ned Seagoon is solicited in tracking down the dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill. His investigations take him to North Africa where he continues his case with characteristic thoroughness. There he meets foreign investigator Grytpype-Thyne. They exchange the following:
Grytpype: Inspector Seagoon, my name is Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, Special Investigation. This Batter Pudding Hurler...
Seagoon: Yes?
Grytpype: He's made a fool of the police.
Seagoon:I disagree, we were fools long before he came along (Milligan 26).
This blatant subversion of authoritative Britannia signaled a new age of socio-cultural irreverence. In this comic climate, The Goon Show sets an airwave precedence in mocking respected public figures.
It’s true most of the main characters have either political or military ties - though none of them reputable. Major Bloodnok is known for being “cashiered [fired] for the 7th time - a world military record” (Milligan 15). Even real-life politicians were not immune to the Goons’ social irreverence. “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest” is described by Roger Wilmut in The Goon Show Companion as “the show in which [Peter] Sellers’s famous impersonations of Sir Winston Churchill finally became too much for the BBC” after they portrayed the Prime Minister bungling under the table, searching for some “blasted telegram.” Wilmut continues: “The BBC banned any further impressions of this sort” (60). It wasn’t so much that The Goon Show revolutionized social commentary. For ages satiric writers and illustrators had laid casual hands to unflattering representations of British aristocracy. However, this was the first time social critics had the responsibility to make light of the constructs necessarily erected for World War II. In this case, it wasn’t the atrocities that were laughable, but instead the caricatured leaders whose imperfections championed the British identity. The world wasn’t so chaotic and war-torn that the British elite couldn’t stomach a laugh at themselves. Especially a laugh they needed so dearly.
The Beatles flounced a similar irreverence for socio-cultural precedent. In response to their 1965 Buckingham visit, Paul remarked, “It’s a keen pad. The Queen? She was just like a mum to us” (Stokes 158). There, the Beatles had just been made Members of the British Empire. With a few inert phrases the Beatles turned a traditionally sober ceremony into just another teenage hangout. This attitude showed Brits and Americans alike that nothing was too serious after all. Not even Buckingham Palace and its housed queen - a paradigm of stoicism, the product of hard wartime labor - were omitted from the easy comical foray of Beatles’ wit. John Lennon’s classic “rattle your jewelry” remark did little to truly rattle anybody. Spitz notes in The Beatles: The Biography that “it wasn’t disrespectful … or scandalous… but it certainly wasn’t anything one expected to hear out of a loyal British subject” (434).
In another characteristic sending up of social flares, Lennon purchased a Rolls-Royce Phantom V Chassis 5VD73 for £11,000 in 1965 (Giuliano 97). At the time, such a purchase was not uncommon for the morbidly wealthy. Reproduced in Plate 1 is a collection of Rolls-Royce/Bentley owners’ manuals and booklets from 1965, albeit reprinted in 1975. Included here is a booklet entitled “What A Good Chauffeur Should Know” and a short book entitled “Rolls-Royce and Bentley Sales Literature” which, according to the auction it was listed under, “provides a checklist of all known factory issued brochures from both marques in chronological order” (Four … Reprints). The fact that a car came with a library of richly ensconced reading material (part of which was meant not for chauffeurs merely, but for ‘good’ chauffeurs) suggests that the average Rolls-Roycer was not your nine-to-five Mr. Smith. This car was intended for a select cache of big spenders - individuals whose cars in fact require supplemental reading, despite the fact that they may never actually read what’s inside.
Lennon’s millions made him part of that cash-tossing collective. In her book, A Twist of Lennon, Cynthia Lennon recounts her ability to give in to a particularly tempting disposition of consumerism during the first American tour: “I felt the urge to spend some dollars. I was in a frivolous money-spending mood. In the lobby of the hotel was housed a boutique and I couldn’t resist the temptation” (121). The Rolls-Royce purchase would have been characteristic of someone with a Beatles-size bank account. What Lennon did next upended that traditional British elitism. Cynthia continues: "During the making of Sergeant Pepper John decided to have the Rolls-Royce painted. Colour and design were of the utmost priority and he employed a firm of barge and caravan designers to do it for him" (142). The paint job can be viewed here in Plate 2. This was something next to public scandal to the bowler-hat-topped Rolls-Royceans of Great Britain. Among a collection of anecdotes surrounding Lennon’s flower-glazed vehicle, one website relates a supposed reaction in 1967: “John’s newly painted psychedelic car drew some public outrage when an old woman, in London’s downtown, attacked the car using her umbrella and yelling: ‘You swine, you swine! How dare you do this to a Rolls-Royce!’” (Whelan). Such a reaction reflects the deep-seated value of social symbols in British culture even in the 1960s. The Beatles’ irreverence was only fanned by such responses. In a statement made to The Rolling Stone, Lennon responds to the question of whether or not the Beatles have been spoiled by success: “Well, you don’t see us running around in bowler hats, do you?” (196).
Examining the popular comic eccentricities of Goon humor, it is easy to picture the Beatles’ entry into the American culture scene as one marked by pointed wit and almost lyric whimsy. The influence of Goonery and absurd humor ultimately transcends national boundaries. In an article published in 1958 by the Radio Times, politician Michael Foot noted, "the fact that the Goons are so popular is one of my hopes for the British public… I'd like to think they'll last another hundred years!" (Pedrick). The humor that is uniquely Goonish is preserved transcontinentally in the humor of the Beatles. John Lennon recounts, “ We were the sons of The Goon Show … We were of an age. We were the extension of that rebellion in a way” (Stark 108). It is found in the unselfconscious tenor of Beatles stage presence, the unabashed cheek of press interviews, and the comic linguistic fluidity of personal interaction. In a Hollywood interview, Giuliano posed a heated question concerning the lyric interpretations of several popular Beatles tunes. According to Time magazine, “Day Tripper” was the story of a prostitute and “Norwegian Wood” was about a lesbian. He asked, “I want to know what your intent was when you wrote them and what your feeling is about Time’s criticism of the music that is being written today?” George responded with characteristic unaffectedness: “We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians. That’s all” (Guiliano 86). The Beatles’ Goonish humor seemed to be tapping society’s shoulder only to hide itself on the other side. It was in an engaging nonchalance, a flippant disregard for social constructs that the Beatles informed society its own comical absurdities. The Beatles’ comic influence both shocked and teased nations out of their social seriousness. All the Beatles really wanted was to subvert traditional social tropes and to hold as many glands as they could, that’s all.
Plate 1:
(Four… Reprints).
Plate 2:
Photo by Becca Lee Jensen, taken at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada December 2004
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