Wings For Wheels

I was hoping the conversation on yesterday’s show would give me the opportunity to talk about people impersonating Frank Sinatra, because I wanted to mention this.  But it never happened, so instead I’m going talk about it in this week’s installment of Songs I Never Get Tired Of.  Here’s Mel Brooks singing “High Anxiety” (it starts around the 6:20 mark).

Back in 1977, my parents dragged me and my sisters to a movie called High Anxiety.  It’s a parody of Alfred Hitchcock movies and borrows liberally from many of The Master’s classics.  I was eight years old, so what did I know about any of that stuff?  All I knew is that my parents, and everyone else in the theater, was in hysterics.  Thankfully, Mel’s humor contains enough that the average eight-year old can understand, so at least I got some of it.

Anyway, so it gets to this scene where they’re at a hotel piano bar and Brooks winds up doing a song.  To this day I still don’t think I’ve heard laughter in a theater like that.  But, like so much of the movie, I didn’t know why it was so funny.  After all, how can a song make you laugh?  Jokes are funny, and songs are music and lyrics about icky things like love, I thought.

Years later we’re watching High Anxiety on TV and it’s time for this scene.  Again, my parents are in tears.  So I ask them, “Why is this funny?” They explained to me that Mel Brooks was simply doing the funniest impersonation of Frank Sinatra they had ever seen. 

Impressionists usually go for the voice.  Brooks doesn’t have that entirely, but he gets everything else right: playing around with the lyrics (“Hey!  Ziety!), the hand gestures. playing with the mic, working the crowd. It’s straight out of Sinatra At The Sands.  The phrasing is also impeccable, especially on the “Yoo-ooo…winnnnnn” that closes the number.

And because he has all the nuances down, it’s a performance you can go back to again and again and still laugh.  The rest of the movie’s pretty good, too.