Subversive humor: dog songs and dog "history"

Changing the lyrics to songs

Another long lasting and totally harmless and innocent form of subversive humor that my ex- and I enjoyed was to change the lyrics to certain songs. Neither of us had a singing voice, so this was not some “hidden signal” that we “wanted to sing.” Rather it was another product of our generation that grew up with rock and roll being an extremely important form of self expression. So for us and many others of that generation, rock and roll served three purposes: 1) it was good music to listen to 2) it had a role in self and societal expression and 3) it lends itself to short hand code expressions. Again I don’t mean hidden messages, but I mean that with a bit of a tune a married couple with a long history and shared worldview could touchstone and exchange a complicated set of thoughts and feelings, either for a lark and fun, or seriously.

During our time in our marriage it was also the height of the “art” of the advertisement jingle! Jingles used exactly that same principle, to convey among those who are intimate a message very quickly and lightly. So that was another factor in our heavy use of funny and weird changed lyrics among us. Plus we had no children, but were dog owners. Anyone in a similar situation knows that people tend to talk to their pets. So we developed a whole bunch of songs and so forth that we would sing to the dogs, or that we would pretend the dogs were singing as being representative of their feelings. It was all innocent and fun, but subversive because there was an intellectual component to it that, like the example I gave before, was somewhat of a “commentary” on the political or cultural times.

One of the earliest things we did that might have baffled nutty spies was that when we got the two puppies that were brothers, we would bounce them (like bouncing babies who could not yet walk) and give them what we called “Tarantella lessons.” The Tarantella is a vigorous Italian folk tune. Most of you would recognize it if you heard it, as it’s played as the backdrop to lots of traditional Italian weddings. So we would sing the instrumental refrain while bouncing the puppies. How did we come up with that? Remember, the Godfather films had been huge in our generation. So this was simply us using a leitmotif that was a little bit sardonic of much of the pop culture. It certainly wasn’t deeper than that (like oh, for example *struggling to remember Italian past lives* or that the *anagram of Tarantella is, I don’t know, something like “tell Ana tar,” showing that in alien past lives we had an employee named “Ana” who was responsible for using tar to patch holes in our driveway). I wish I was kidding that this is how seriously cultists tried to “interpret” the silly jingles that a married couple did with their puppies dancing on the kitchen floor, but it really was that bad, I found out years later.

So when we would think of “songs” for the dogs we would take traditional songs, but sometimes also pop or rock refrains, and put silly words into them. Rhyming was always a problem so we’d have favorite words that are handy for rhyming that we’d use often (for that reason alone, not anything mysterious, as I already explained.) But being aware intellectuals (but not movers and shakers, obviously), we’d work in some subversive commentary. For example, people were constantly talking about clones, in both science and science fiction fantasy. So we often worked the word “clone” into the dog’s songs. Obviously this was not a confession or endorsement of cloning, morons. It was a social commentary about a hot topic, so we were making it (for laughs) like the dogs had some involvement in this topic. We’d have them sing about their clone heritage, or accuse others of being clones, ha ha. I still smile when I think of it, because those memories have not been ruined, and won’t be.

One of our favorite tunes to use was the old country tune “Get along little dogie.”
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Dogie's-Lament-lyrics-Kingston-Trio/1FE9CCF94F64443D48256BF00023EF75

Doggie is a cowboy term for a young calf. I can’t believe I have to explain the humorous connection, but here it is. “Dogie” as in calf sounds like “doggie” as in dog. Wow. So we would use a cowboy song because it came already with a reference to “dogie” that we could sing to our dogs! I know, it’s evil genius isn’t it? To sing to your dogs a song that has the word doggie in it? So we would often sing, “Get along little doggie… “And then make up silly lines for the rest of the stanza. One of our favorites was to sing “Get along little doggie, with a rag and a bone. Your mother’s a (use something from the news or other current joke) and your father’s a clone.” Both “clone” and “bone” were the rhyming words to take the place of the words “own” and “home” in the original. This was not the hidden alien creed that we were singing. It was a silly song to sing to dogs while playing with them. Our two big dogs loved to play tug (“a rag”) and all dogs love bones (“a bone”), duh. I explained about the clone already, and so all that was left was to plug into the “mother” whatever silly term was on the news or sounded especially funny that day.

Our third dog was adopted when she was older, and had been given up because her elderly owner went into a nursing home, and the son didn’t want her. She had issues, mainly trust of humans and I had to do serious work with her, since she was sickly, scared, a biter and had some pathologies from her past, including deadly fear and rage of her tail being touched and an inability to play. She became a wonderful dog, but one that was never normal. We were heartbroken that we had her only five years or so before she succumbed to cancer. She loved to sit on my lap and watch TV (so long as I did not touch her tail). Obviously she got the nickname “Boo Boo Tail” and had special songs of her own. With her past the songs were a little less lighthearted, but still done for fun and it did make her sometimes “want” to play, even though she never could learn how. As our way of dealing with the world of hurt that she had obviously come from, we developed a joking “history” for her. Here’s an example. Totally unexpectedly she was all gentle and protective of my godson, who was just a baby, when his parents brought him to visit. She just adored him and lay next to him very protectively on the couch (and being a baby he didn’t touch her tail!) So we developed a code word routine about her that made her out to be a “nurse” with a “heart of gold.” That is why we called her “Nurse Sonja.” See, when a couple shares a history and real life events, you don’t go once a day, “Remember the time that baby so and so was here and Sonja was really nice to him?” Duh, obviously we do. So when we referred to her as “Nurse Sonja,” we were using code word to evoke that day and that duality in her of personality, due to her experiences. That’s it; no secret past life hidden ninja UFO religious reason for calling a little dog a nurse. It’s just the way normal people who are intimate talk.

I had a boss who learned (the hard way) to be a helicopter pilot during Vietnam. So we added that into our folklore joke routine and say that “Nurse Sonja” prefers flying a helicopter to get to her patients, swearing all the time (since obviously she’s bad tempered nurse AND sitting on her “boo boo tail”). We would really laugh at that and it was a popular image because, duh, she hated going in the car to the vet and also that involved tail touching. So the helicopter tag line in our joke routine about her became common and remained very funny to us. It was not an endorsement of a color or gender of nurses, of a secret need for a nurse or a “past life” (remember, there is no reincarnation), or an endorsement of the helicopter business or of use of helicopters in the medical field. It was a personal joke, people.

Often our songs would reference the politician Dan Quayle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle

First of all, he has a cool name useful in rhyming. I still favor it for that reason! Second he was an integral part of the political and pop culture. Like the nursing home example, we would reference him to be somewhat subversive. While everyone else mocked his occasional misstatements and perceived lack of intellectual power, we mocked the mockers by mentioning him a lot in our personal songs! It really was, and is, as simple as that. It meets the definition of subversive because even though Dan Quayle’s politics were miles from my ex’s (and appeared to be miles from mine, but was not really since I was keeping my actual political and religious thoughts entirely private), we were very uncomfortable with the continued bashing he took. He was really pretty much the first politician to be mistreated in a way that is now commonplace with both celebrities and politicians, which is to have their every small weakness or error endlessly mocked and racked over the coals by the media. So we did our own little compensation.

I guess I could remember and reminisce about other examples, but I think I’ve made my point.