The Barton Brothers, Mickey Katz, and Others: Yiddish-English Bilingual Parody Songs

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (that is, bilingual) parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons’ unexpected success—their send-up of Yiddish radio, “Joe & Paul,” was a bona fide hit, however improbable—inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-rate studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Capitol Records issued (possibly to their own amazement) a steady stream of these Yinglish albums by Katz all through the 1950s and into the ‘60s. These in turn inspired Allan Sherman, a TV gameshow writer/producer, to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs. Though hardly any of Sherman’s lyrics had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded—phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically—to Yiddish beginnings. Close readings of selected tracks by the Bartons, by Katz, and by Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny. This lecture originally took place on July 9, 2020.