Nagasaki?
My aunt spotted this out during the sing while you sell number: Groucho sings to Harpo "Come on Wacky, Nagasaki". Has anyone else noticed this, or I'm the only one who DIDN'T?
shareNagasaki - is the title and subject of a 1928 song with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Mort Dixon. A popular success in its day, the music remains a popular base for jazz improvisations. The lyrics today are enjoyed for their ludicrous incongruity and their lack of political correctness.
The song asserts: "Hot ginger and dynamite/There's nothing but that at night/Back in Nagasaki/Where the fellers chew tobaccy/And the women wicky wacky woo." Nagasaki is also the setting for Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.
I didn't know this either before I copied and pasted, but it's no doubt this "wicky wacky" song Groucho was referring to. Nagasaki is more synonimous with the atomic bomb since 1945, so that line can sound a little strange.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Hillarious..."Where the fellers chew tobaccy and the women wicky wacky woo."
Haha!
You got IT...and you can keep IT.
-Chico(Monkey Business).
Sometimes this lyric was song as "Back in Hackensacky", perhaps it was changed during the war. In the Woody Allen film "Bullets over Broadway," set before the war, in the late 20s, the lyric is "Hackensack."
shareMost Americans at the time weren´t very interested in geography -- most had no idea of where Pearl Harbor was before Dec. 7, 1941. And it's nice to see someone mention Madame Butterfly and the greatest composer of melody, Puccini.
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