Alright, you want to play hard ball, check out this Jewish version of "Come ona my house" sung with Yiddish words embellishing the English. My brother and I used to play all the Mickey Katz records in the mid to late 1950's. He took many the top hits of the day and made Yiddish versions of the songs.
Here is Mickey's version of the Rosemary Clooney hit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m0c5yaEvLA
If you know a little Yiddish and/ or know Jewish humor a bit, these are a riot. If you don't have any reality on Yiddish, they probably won't do anything for you.
My favortie from those days was a Katz tune called "Murietta", refering to the Murrieta Hot Springs down near Temecula in Southwestern Riverside County in Souther California. In the 1920's through the 1950's Murietta was a hang out for a lot of old Jews of Eastern European heritage who used to take the baths in various spas throughout Eastern Europe and Germany prior to WWII. One of the major spas still going is Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic which is better known by its German name, Karsbad (Karl's bath). This spa is still going strong and is in what once was the Sudetenland which Germany annexed in 1938 when Neville Chamberlin of England appeased Hitler to keep "Peace in our Time"
My favorite line in the song is "Kein Donder or Blitz, just sitz und schwitz and play a little Canasta in the Smog." (No thunder of lightning, just sit and sweat and play a little Canasta card game in the smog of Riverside County.)
I tried to post that song but youtube does not have it.
Instead will put up Katz's version of "16 Tons" and one of his most famour songs, his version of "Davey Crockett"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z66tF_UiQc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwczIc4FNV0&NR=1
Not everyone knows or can appreciate Yiddish humor but if you one can, it is just side splitting humor, unlike anything else I know of. Yiddish is actually a dialect of German, pronounced much differently, proabably about equal in difference to Ameriican English and Cockney English from London. I mean, the words are the same but pronounced so much differently that one has to strain to understand what is being said. German is only about 75 to 80% of what constitues Yiddish. The other 20 to 25% of the words come from various sources, namely Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and English. It is to a large extent these non German words, sprinkled amongst the bastardized German that give Yiddish its expressiveness and make it such a colorful language.
I was very fortunate in that my parents decided to send me to Yiddish school instead of Hebrew school when I was 11 1/2 and starting the 7th Grade to prepare me for my Bar Mitzvah which took place at age 13 in Yiddish. In those days, early 1950's, all my grandparents and most of the other "mispoche" which means family members such as Aunts and Uncles all knew and could talk Yiddish. From my study of Yiddish, this led me later to take classes in German plus it gave me the ability to understand Jewish humor and tell Jewish jokes.
I was a serious minded guy but I could let my hair down and tell Jewish jokes. using Yiddish words and a Jewish accent with the best of them. The two best I ever met were my brother Rueben and Dan Linker. When on lines at ASHO, the 3 of us met several times at New York George's across from the Blue Complex and began telling Jewish jokes. A couple of the jokes had punch lines so humorous, that I remember Linker falling to the floor and laughing so hard at one of my Brother's punch lines that he nearly lost control. I was afraid he was going to pee in his pants. He had uncontrolled side splitting laughter for a good 3 minutes before he could regain control of himself, he kept saying, "Reuben, you are the best, Reuben, you are King" (of Jewish joke telling)! Linker was no slouch either, he had that dry droll Jewish attitude and accent down perfectly. He gave Reuben a real run for his money. I was a strong 3rd place among those two giants.
Lakey
etc. on stage.
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