Potrzebie
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Origins of "hoohah"
Watching HBO's Mildred Pierce, I was startled to see the owner of a Hollywood hashhouse say "hoo-ha". Mildred is looking for a job in 1931, and she's in Christof's restaurant when an argument develops between two waitresses over a tip. Christof intervenes and says, "Okay, okay, cut the hoo-ha!" (That's how it's spelled in the closed captions.)
James M. Cain liked to incorporate language he heard on the street, but "hoo-ha" is not in his novel Mildred Pierce (1941). So it was an addition to the screenplay by writer-director Todd Haynes. The Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the "first known use" as 1931 but has no citation for that source.
The word derives from the Yiddish hu-ha, meaning a commotion, uproar, hullabaloo, an argument between a group of people or an exclamation of surprise. I'd never given much thought to the word prior to Kurtzman's use in the first issue of Mad. He introduced several Yiddishisms in Mad, and he used "Hoohah" as a shout (as in "Melvin of the Apes"). But when it was first used on page one of Mad #1, it seemed to indicate the traditional meanings (and also Kurtzman's triumphant yell to announce the debut of Mad). Kurtzman had previously created a straight haunted house tale, "House of Horror", for the first 1950 issue of The Haunt of Fear, so he was actually satirizing himself with "Hoohah!"
Growing up in the South, all of the Yiddish expressions in Mad were unfamiliar to me until I read them in Mad in the early 1950s. I told Jay Lynch about the Mildred Pierce scene, and he responded with the New Jersey perspective:
I had heard "hoo-ha" used as a kid in my neighborhood in Newark before I saw it in Mad. In Mad it is used as an expletive. But I knew it to mean rigamarole or nonsense before that.
My Newark neighborhood (I lived at 721 Highland Ave.) was Jewish, Italian and black. Sometimes words intermixed. There are two specific words of my youth, which I haven't heard outside of that block in Newark. One is "Schneichick", which as a noun means a person who does a half-assed job at something, and as a verb means the same... i.e. "Don't be a schneichick! You're doing a scheneichick job vaccuming that rug!" The other word is pronounced "bootza" maybe spelled "butzah", and it means to flick something with your index finger.
The origin of Schneichick I know. It's a Yiddish thing... or a Russian thing... a kid in 19th-century Russia in a small village was named Schnei (a common name of the era, which means "Sainai"). Chic is a diminutive. So it means Schnei-boy. Anyway, Schnei's mother saw it was going to rain... so she told Schnei to close the windows... and he then closed the windows of every house in the village. The other Schneichick tale is that Schneichick's mother bought him a raincoat, which he then wore all the time... even when it wasn't raining.
"Butzah" might be an Italian word. There is no word in English with its precise meaning. But then again, it might be a Russian or Yiddish word. I don't know. I haven't heard anyone (outside of my relatives) use it since l947 in Newark on that block. Although my relatives continue to use that word. Hoo-ha which is, in their usage, synonomous with Bru-ha-ha.
I think words like "smek" and "furshlugginer" in Mad were humor at the time in that they were words used by old people. Yet in Mad they were used in a hip context, which made them unexpected and therefore humorous in that context. Kind of different from say Lenny Bruce's use of such Yiddish words, which were not words that had become arcane at the time he used them. Words like schmuck and schvartza which never left the lexicon. Actually, I never heard "furshlugginer" until I saw it in Mad. The word that means "crazy" would actually be "meshuganah". But where Kurtzman grew up maybe they had a different dialect on his block.
Kurtzman's ''Ikey and Mikey'' sidewalk comic I would think is based upon a risque song that was sung at the time by kids. Benny Bell did a cleaned-up, recorded version. I have kids singing a bit of the original version in the strip I did with Ed Piskor called "Dead Rat" which is on line somewhere. By the way, Benny Bell's grandson wrote a nifty biography of Benny Bell. I got a copy a few years back from Amazon. Bell did slightly risque comedy records in the 1940s and 1950s. He is famous for the old song "Shaving Cream" which Dr. Demento brought out of obscurity in the late 1970s. Most of Bell's stuff is based on anonymous neighborhood dirty songs. I still remember most of the original words to these. Most are on the order of "Sweet Violets". Not the Dinah Shore version, though.
You know, because I spoke Newarkese before I learned to read, I still don't know the correct pronounciation of a lot of words. I tend to use silent "r"s, and I still think that the Mayor of NYC was named LaGuadia.
-- Jay Lynch
But now consider this passage from T.S. Eliot, which is curiously similar to the story elements in Kurtzman's "Hoohah!" Eliot's "hoo-ha's" are a mix of fear, guilt and terror.
When you're alone in the middle of the night
And you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright
When you're alone in the middle of the bed
And you wake like someone hit you on the head
You've had a cream of a nightmare dream
And you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you
And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock
for you know the hangman's waiting for you.
And perhaps you're alive
And perhaps you're dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
Hoo
Hoo
Hoo
−T. S. Eliot (Sweeney Agonistes, 1926)
For the full "Hoohah!", surf over to Jeff Overturf.
Page one of Mad #1
James M. Cain liked to incorporate language he heard on the street, but "hoo-ha" is not in his novel Mildred Pierce (1941). So it was an addition to the screenplay by writer-director Todd Haynes. The Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the "first known use" as 1931 but has no citation for that source.
The word derives from the Yiddish hu-ha, meaning a commotion, uproar, hullabaloo, an argument between a group of people or an exclamation of surprise. I'd never given much thought to the word prior to Kurtzman's use in the first issue of Mad. He introduced several Yiddishisms in Mad, and he used "Hoohah" as a shout (as in "Melvin of the Apes"). But when it was first used on page one of Mad #1, it seemed to indicate the traditional meanings (and also Kurtzman's triumphant yell to announce the debut of Mad). Kurtzman had previously created a straight haunted house tale, "House of Horror", for the first 1950 issue of The Haunt of Fear, so he was actually satirizing himself with "Hoohah!"
Growing up in the South, all of the Yiddish expressions in Mad were unfamiliar to me until I read them in Mad in the early 1950s. I told Jay Lynch about the Mildred Pierce scene, and he responded with the New Jersey perspective:
I had heard "hoo-ha" used as a kid in my neighborhood in Newark before I saw it in Mad. In Mad it is used as an expletive. But I knew it to mean rigamarole or nonsense before that.
My Newark neighborhood (I lived at 721 Highland Ave.) was Jewish, Italian and black. Sometimes words intermixed. There are two specific words of my youth, which I haven't heard outside of that block in Newark. One is "Schneichick", which as a noun means a person who does a half-assed job at something, and as a verb means the same... i.e. "Don't be a schneichick! You're doing a scheneichick job vaccuming that rug!" The other word is pronounced "bootza" maybe spelled "butzah", and it means to flick something with your index finger.
The origin of Schneichick I know. It's a Yiddish thing... or a Russian thing... a kid in 19th-century Russia in a small village was named Schnei (a common name of the era, which means "Sainai"). Chic is a diminutive. So it means Schnei-boy. Anyway, Schnei's mother saw it was going to rain... so she told Schnei to close the windows... and he then closed the windows of every house in the village. The other Schneichick tale is that Schneichick's mother bought him a raincoat, which he then wore all the time... even when it wasn't raining.
"Butzah" might be an Italian word. There is no word in English with its precise meaning. But then again, it might be a Russian or Yiddish word. I don't know. I haven't heard anyone (outside of my relatives) use it since l947 in Newark on that block. Although my relatives continue to use that word. Hoo-ha which is, in their usage, synonomous with Bru-ha-ha.
I think words like "smek" and "furshlugginer" in Mad were humor at the time in that they were words used by old people. Yet in Mad they were used in a hip context, which made them unexpected and therefore humorous in that context. Kind of different from say Lenny Bruce's use of such Yiddish words, which were not words that had become arcane at the time he used them. Words like schmuck and schvartza which never left the lexicon. Actually, I never heard "furshlugginer" until I saw it in Mad. The word that means "crazy" would actually be "meshuganah". But where Kurtzman grew up maybe they had a different dialect on his block.
Kurtzman's ''Ikey and Mikey'' sidewalk comic I would think is based upon a risque song that was sung at the time by kids. Benny Bell did a cleaned-up, recorded version. I have kids singing a bit of the original version in the strip I did with Ed Piskor called "Dead Rat" which is on line somewhere. By the way, Benny Bell's grandson wrote a nifty biography of Benny Bell. I got a copy a few years back from Amazon. Bell did slightly risque comedy records in the 1940s and 1950s. He is famous for the old song "Shaving Cream" which Dr. Demento brought out of obscurity in the late 1970s. Most of Bell's stuff is based on anonymous neighborhood dirty songs. I still remember most of the original words to these. Most are on the order of "Sweet Violets". Not the Dinah Shore version, though.
You know, because I spoke Newarkese before I learned to read, I still don't know the correct pronounciation of a lot of words. I tend to use silent "r"s, and I still think that the Mayor of NYC was named LaGuadia.
-- Jay Lynch
But now consider this passage from T.S. Eliot, which is curiously similar to the story elements in Kurtzman's "Hoohah!" Eliot's "hoo-ha's" are a mix of fear, guilt and terror.
When you're alone in the middle of the night
And you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright
When you're alone in the middle of the bed
And you wake like someone hit you on the head
You've had a cream of a nightmare dream
And you've got the hoo-ha's coming to you
And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock
for you know the hangman's waiting for you.
And perhaps you're alive
And perhaps you're dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
Hoo
Hoo
Hoo
−T. S. Eliot (Sweeney Agonistes, 1926)
For the full "Hoohah!", surf over to Jeff Overturf.
Labels: kurtzman, lynch, mad, mildred pierce
¶ 10:27 AM 1 comments
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Topps #9: Wacky Packages
.
I have a memory lapse when I try to recall which Wacky Packages and Wacky Ads I devised over 35 to 40 years ago. I know one of them was the dog shaving with Rabid Shave and another was the Mustard Charge card. (See below.)
Of course, all the Wackys were much smaller than the actual products, and the main reason I did the Mustard Charge sticker was because I wanted to do a Wacky Package that could fool the eye by being the exact same size as the product being satirized.
A news story today is about the cyber attacks on Visa and MasterCard. So far as I know, no one has ever hacked into Mustard Charge.
The 1973 New York cover story is headlined Wacky Packs. I never quite understood why Topps didn't change the name to the more euphonic Wacky Packs, since that's what kids called the cards and stickers.
The usual procedure was to first go to a store, buy some products and study each until a gag came to mind. Then it was a matter of embellishing the main premise with related gags.
Working on a layout pad, one could sketch out the gag and then put the rough under another layout sheet to tighten the drawing. After inking with a Rapidograph, the rough was then colored with markers. If the color rough were accepted, editorial changes might or might not be written on it, and it would then be used as a color guide for the final art.
Back then, Topps was still in Brookyn at the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park (the setting for the new Paul Auster novel, Sunset Park). The Bush Terminal is a huge complex, used during World War II for the shipping of troop supplies to Europe. There was a plan during the 1990s to turn it into Silicon Valley East, but that never got underway.
In Topps' Product Development Department, there was a central area where secretary Faye Fleischer sat near banks of file cabinets. Creative director Woody Gelman used these to file away all rough gags, possible ideas, clippings and even various kinds of paper stocks, along with tricks, gimmicks, pop-up oddities, lenticular images and cardboard novelty items.
Gelman and writer-editor Len Brown had adjacent offices that opened into Faye's area, as did my office, which was near the offices of the imaginative Art Spiegelman, designer Rick Varesi and gagwriter Stan Hart, who had married into the company and came in only one day a week. Hart wrote the Mad movie satires and later was a two-time Emmy-winner as a scripter for The Carol Burnett Show. A door on the other side of Gelman's room led to the office of the clever cartoonist and entertaining raconteur Larry Riley, whom I described in the third installment of this series about Topps. Sometimes Jay Lynch came to New York and worked periodically in the Product Development Dept.
Each day when I entered the building, as I recall, I went past a small sign that read, "Uneeda Doll Co." The floor of my office could get quite hot, and one day I peered into the ground floor area occupied by the Uneeda company and saw fumes rising from giant boiling vats. Later I began to wonder if seepage from those fumes is why we were all going wacky in Product Development.
One day in the summer of 1968, I told Woody I was going out, left the overheated office, exited the Bush Terminal and turned on 3rd Avenue toward Bay Ridge, perspiring as I walked through the broiling Brooklyn heat to a distant supermarket. At that time of day, the place was almost deserted. I wandered the aisles, sometimes just standing and reading the copy on containers to see what might be twisted into something goofy.
I looked up and noticed the store manager at the end of an aisle, staring at me. Since my actions were not those of a usual grocery shopper, he thought I was getting ready to steal something. After making my purchases, I headed back to Topps, carrying a paper bag filled with parody potentials, including a can of frozen orange juice concentrate.
I set these up near my drawing table, locked up and took the train back to Manhattan. When I opened the office door on Monday morning, there was a surprise. With the heat rising to a bake oven temperature during the weekend, the orange juice had exploded, leaving an orangey stickiness scattered over the drawing table and the wall. It was still stuck to the wall when I left New York and moved to Boston.
Google Street View screenshot at right shows where Topps was located at 254 36th Street in Brooklyn. At left is corner of 36th Street and 3rd Avenue where Woody Gelman and Len Brown would park their cars beneath the Gowanus Expressway.
I have a memory lapse when I try to recall which Wacky Packages and Wacky Ads I devised over 35 to 40 years ago. I know one of them was the dog shaving with Rabid Shave and another was the Mustard Charge card. (See below.)
Of course, all the Wackys were much smaller than the actual products, and the main reason I did the Mustard Charge sticker was because I wanted to do a Wacky Package that could fool the eye by being the exact same size as the product being satirized.
A news story today is about the cyber attacks on Visa and MasterCard. So far as I know, no one has ever hacked into Mustard Charge.
The 1973 New York cover story is headlined Wacky Packs. I never quite understood why Topps didn't change the name to the more euphonic Wacky Packs, since that's what kids called the cards and stickers.
The usual procedure was to first go to a store, buy some products and study each until a gag came to mind. Then it was a matter of embellishing the main premise with related gags.
Working on a layout pad, one could sketch out the gag and then put the rough under another layout sheet to tighten the drawing. After inking with a Rapidograph, the rough was then colored with markers. If the color rough were accepted, editorial changes might or might not be written on it, and it would then be used as a color guide for the final art.
Back then, Topps was still in Brookyn at the Bush Terminal in Sunset Park (the setting for the new Paul Auster novel, Sunset Park). The Bush Terminal is a huge complex, used during World War II for the shipping of troop supplies to Europe. There was a plan during the 1990s to turn it into Silicon Valley East, but that never got underway.
In Topps' Product Development Department, there was a central area where secretary Faye Fleischer sat near banks of file cabinets. Creative director Woody Gelman used these to file away all rough gags, possible ideas, clippings and even various kinds of paper stocks, along with tricks, gimmicks, pop-up oddities, lenticular images and cardboard novelty items.
Gelman and writer-editor Len Brown had adjacent offices that opened into Faye's area, as did my office, which was near the offices of the imaginative Art Spiegelman, designer Rick Varesi and gagwriter Stan Hart, who had married into the company and came in only one day a week. Hart wrote the Mad movie satires and later was a two-time Emmy-winner as a scripter for The Carol Burnett Show. A door on the other side of Gelman's room led to the office of the clever cartoonist and entertaining raconteur Larry Riley, whom I described in the third installment of this series about Topps. Sometimes Jay Lynch came to New York and worked periodically in the Product Development Dept.
Each day when I entered the building, as I recall, I went past a small sign that read, "Uneeda Doll Co." The floor of my office could get quite hot, and one day I peered into the ground floor area occupied by the Uneeda company and saw fumes rising from giant boiling vats. Later I began to wonder if seepage from those fumes is why we were all going wacky in Product Development.
I looked up and noticed the store manager at the end of an aisle, staring at me. Since my actions were not those of a usual grocery shopper, he thought I was getting ready to steal something. After making my purchases, I headed back to Topps, carrying a paper bag filled with parody potentials, including a can of frozen orange juice concentrate.
I set these up near my drawing table, locked up and took the train back to Manhattan. When I opened the office door on Monday morning, there was a surprise. With the heat rising to a bake oven temperature during the weekend, the orange juice had exploded, leaving an orangey stickiness scattered over the drawing table and the wall. It was still stuck to the wall when I left New York and moved to Boston.
Google Street View screenshot at right shows where Topps was located at 254 36th Street in Brooklyn. At left is corner of 36th Street and 3rd Avenue where Woody Gelman and Len Brown would park their cars beneath the Gowanus Expressway.Labels: gelman, larry riley, len brown, lynch, memoir, topps, wacky
¶ 2:43 PM 4 comments
