Steve Martin and the Toot Uncommons – "King Tut" (1978)

Born in Arizona

Moved to Babylonia

King Tut!

Most Monday mornings, I hit the gym at the Damascus (MD) Community Recreation Center.  (If I don’t watch my figure, who will?)

My route to the rec center takes me past Damascus High School.  The school has a fancy electronic marquee, but it also has a more traditional hand-operated message board that requires someone to place individual plastic letters to spell out messages.  

That message board has two faces.  One of the faces is mostly used to announce the days and times of upcoming events at the school – like football games, or drama club productions.  The other face usually contains punny jokes.  

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Here’s the message that’s currently displayed on the Damascus High School message board:

You might think that the person in charge of the message board was guilty of misspelling “SUMMER.”  But you’d be wrong.

If you take one “M” away from “SUMMER,” you have “SUMER” – which is the name of the world’s oldest civilization.

The Sumerian civilization emerged in southern Mesopotamia circa 4500 BCE.  It was succeeded by the Akkadian Empire, which in turn was succeeded by the First Babylonian Empire.  

Hence the punning reference to “SUMER” on the message board.   

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James Boswell quoted Dr. Samuel Johnson as saying that “puns are the lowest form of humor.”  Whoever is in charge of the Damascus High message boards obviously disagrees with Dr. Johnson.

Here are some of the other puns that appeared on the message board this year:

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I called the school over the summer to ask who was responsible for coming up with the puns on the Damascus message board, and learned that the culprit was one of the teachers at the school.

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll introduce you to Damascus High’s “Punmaster General.”

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More than eight million Americans viewed the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit, which brought 53 artifacts from King Tut’s tomb to seven different cities between 1976 and 1979.

The resulting “Tut-mania” inspired Steve Martin to write today’s featured song, which he performed on Saturday Night Live on April 22, 1978.  “King Tut” was released as a single a week later, and eventually sold over a million copies.  

Click here to watch a video of the Martin doing “King Tut” on SNL.  Note especially the instrumental solo performed by a saxophone player whose face was painted gold to resemble Tut’s famous solid-gold funerary mask:

In 2017, students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, blasted a professor’s decision to show a video of Martin’s Saturday Night Live performance in a freshman humanities class, calling it cultural appropriation. 

The pearl-clutching students objected in particular to the saxophonist’s gold-painted face, which they claimed was the equivalent of blackface.

Click here to view Martin responding to this absurd accusation.

Amazing Rhythm Aces – "Third Rate Romance" (1975)

She was staring at her coffee cup

He was trying to keep his courage up

By applying booze

I recently wrote about a Family Feud episode where one of the survey questions was “If all the U.S. presidents were alive, single, and ready to mingle, who would you date?”  

The two most popular answers were John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.  Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Thomas Jefferson were the other Presidents mentioned by the survey’s respondents.

The members of the two families playing Family Feud that day managed to name six of those seven Presidents.  The one that they didn’t get was Thomas Jefferson.

Both the families who competed in the particular Family Feud were both African-American.  Given the nature of our third President’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, I would think that Jefferson would be the last President that any African-American woman would want to date.

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On New Year’s Day 1772, the 28-year-old Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton.

Jefferson’s bride was only 23, but she was already a widow.  (Her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, had been just 24 when he had died in September 1768.  The couple’s three-year-old son had died in June 1771.)

Martha Jefferson died in 1782, only months after giving birth to the couple’s sixth child.  (That child reportedly weighed over 16 pounds at birth.)  Four of their children died before reaching their third birthday.

Thomas Jefferson lived 44 years after Martha’s death.  She had not had good relationships with her two stepmothers, and before her death she asked him to promise that he would never remarry.  

He never did.

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In 1787, when Jefferson was the American ambassador to France, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s nine-year-old daughter Maria to Paris.

Hemings, who was only 14 years old at the time, was a slave who Jefferson had inherited from his wife’s father, John Wayles, in 1773.

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal was
a miniseries that aired on CBS in 2000

Wayles was not only Sally Hemings’s owner, he was her father.  In fact, Sally was only one of six children Wayles fathered with Sally’s mother, Elizabeth Hemings, who Wayles had owned for her entire life.  

Does it seem odd that some of the children fathered by John Wayles – who was a white Englishman – were born free, while his other children were born into slavery?  That’s because of partus sequitur ventrem – “that which is born follows the womb” – which was a legal doctrine that provided that the children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. 

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In 1789, Jefferson – accompanied by his daughter and Sally Hemings – left Paris to return to the United States and become George Washington’s Secretary of State.  

It is believed that Hemings became pregnant by Jefferson at some point during their time together in Paris.  That child died shortly after Hemings returned to the U.S.

Hemings gave birth to six more children between 1795 and 1808.  Based on DNA evidence, it is now generally accepted that Jefferson was the father of at least one of those children, and perhaps all of them.

Click here to watch a Saturday Night Live sketch about Jefferson and Hemings.

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In theory, Sally Hemings became a free woman the moment she entered France in 1787 – slavery was illegal in France.  But she continued to act as Jefferson’s servant, and chose to return to Virginia with him two years later.

One of Hemings’s sons later said that his mother agreed to resume her life as an enslaved person because Jefferson had promised that he would free her children when they became of age if she did.

But Hemings was only 16 and possibly pregnant when Jefferson left France in 1789.  It’s not clear that she had much choice except to return to Virginia with him – how would she have supported herself if she had remained in France instead?

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Jefferson never spoke about his feelings for Sally Hemings, but his actions after returning from France were not inconsistent with the belief of her descendants that he “loved her dearly.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of a book about Jefferson and Hemings, believes that his feelings for her went well beyond lust:

While lust can last minutes, months, or even a few years, it cannot typically span the decades during which [Jefferson and Hemings] were involved. It simply takes more than lust to sustain an interest in another person over such an extended time period.

Jefferson had access to many other women at Monticello who could have satisfied his carnal interests.  Yet, so far as the record shows, he remained fixated on Sally Hemings, arranging her life at Monticello so that she interacted with him on a daily basis for almost four decades.  Despite the brutal public attention focused on the pair after James Callender exposed their relationship in 1802, Jefferson continued to have children with Hemings. Their children . . . were named for people important to him. His white daughter was said to have wanted Jefferson to send Hemings and their children away so as to spare him further embarrassment. He declined.

But before you turn the Jefferson-Hemings relationship into some kind of rom-com, think about this:

In the U.S., where Hemings was enslaved to Jefferson, he exercised near total legal, economic, and physical control over her life.  As an enslaved person, Hemings would not have been able to refuse sexual access without risk of punishment, sale, or violence, and any absence of recorded force reflects the structural secrecy and power imbalance inherent in slavery rather than evidence of voluntariness.  Under these conditions, meaningful consent is generally considered impossible.  Many historians and scholars therefore describe Jefferson's actions as sexual exploitation or a “forced embrace” within chattel slavery.

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The Amazing Rhythm Aces released 18 albums over a 30-year-plus period, but only their first single  made much of an impression on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

“Third Rate Romance” was written by the group’s lead singer, the late Russell Smith, and released in 1975 on their first album, Stacked Deck.

The female one-night-stander says “I’ve never really done this kind of thing before,” and asks her male paramour if he has.  “Yes, I have,” he replies, “but only a time or two.”

I have a feeling both of them may have been fibbing.

Click here to listen to “Third Rate Romance.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

K. Flay – "The President Has a Sex Tape" (2017)

The President has a sex tape

Your daughters aren’t safe at night!

I don’t know how Instagram’s algorithm works, and I don’t really want to know.

What I do know is that it feeds me a LOT of Family Feud videos.

I haven’t watched Family Feud on TV in many, many years.  But based on the snippets from the show that Instagram sends to me, it’s clear that people haven’t gotten any smarter since Steve Harvey took over the show from John O’Hurley, who took it over from Richard Karn, who took it over from Louie Anderson, who took it over from Ray Combs, who took it over from Richard Dawson, who was the host when Family Feud first came on the air in 1976.  

Steve Harvey

(Yes, you read that right – Family Feud has been around for FIFTY YEARS!)

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The families who were on the Family Feud episode I saw on Instagram today are clearly among the dumbest people in the entire U. S. of A.  

Although they might not been as dumb as the women who answered “A funeral” when Harvey asked her to name an occasion where people take a lot of photographs.  (Weddings, birthdays, vacations, and family reunions were the correct answers.)

Click here to watch the Family Feud segment I watched today, which featured this question: “If all the U.S. presidents were alive, single, and ready to mingle, who would you date?” 

The contestant who rang in first – an older African-American woman – responded “Barack Obama.”  (In her dreams!)

But the hugely-pregnant player from the other team topped her by giving the #1 answer – John F. Kennedy.

(I was not surprised that Kennedy was the choice of 41 of the 100 people who were surveyed – younger people may not have chosen him, but he would be a runaway winner if you asked women of my generation.)

The next two contestants answered “Abe Lincoln” and “George Washington,” which were #4 and #5 on the list of correct answers.  

I seriously doubt that any woman today would really want to date Abe or George, although they were both over six feet tall (which is important for many women) – I’m guessing they were picked because they’re the first two men that people think of when they’re asked to name Presidents.

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The next contestant stunned Harvey by answering “Madison.”  

James Madison – our fourth President – was kind of a big deal.  He is known as the “Father of the Constitution” thanks to his role in drafting that document and getting the states to ratify it.  He also persuaded Thomas Jefferson – who he served as Secretary of State – to move ahead with the Louisiana Purchase.

But at five feet four inches tall, Madison was our shortest President.  In fact, he was the only President who was shorter than his wife:

Dolley Madison was three inches
 taller than her husband

I’m sorry, but there are very few women out there interested in dating a guy who’s only five-foot-four.  Not surprisingly, Madison was not on the Family Feud list. 

The team picked up a second strike when the next family member answered “George Bush.”  Although that answer turned out to be wrong, it wasn’t a bad choice strategy-wise because there are TWO George Bushes.  So the team had two shots to win with that answer, not just one.

The next contestant to answer pulled her team’s chestnuts out of the fire by answering “Bill Clinton.”  Clinton barely made the list – only two of the people surveyed picked him.  

That surprised me – I figured he would rank higher.  Several women I know who were introduced to Clinton at political events in Washington admitted to me that they got a little weak in the knees during those encounters.

Maybe the wording of the question confused them.  The question asked you to name a President who was “single and ready to mingle.”  Clinton is not single, of course, but he is clearly ready to mingle at the drop of a hat.

It turns out that the #3-ranked answer to the question was “Ronald Reagan.”  Reagan was a good-looking former movie star, and had a winning personality.  But I figured that his politics might disqualify him from consideration by a lot of women.  Also, he was our oldest President – I assumed that his age was work against him.  (After all, the Presidents who ranked #1 and #2 on the Family Feud list were the two youngest to hold that office.

I found it very encouraging that so many of the women surveyed picked a man who was 77  years old when he left office as the President they would most like to date.

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The pressure was on the next contestant – there was only one name left on the list of correct answers, and if she didn’t pick the right President, the other team would have a chance to win.

At first blush, the man she named  – Robert Kennedy – was an excellent response.  RFK was youthful, good-looking, and came from a wealthy family.  

There was just one problem with the answer.  ROBERT KENNEDY WAS NEVER PRESIDENT.

BZZZZZ! 

That gave the other team a chance to steal the win.  But the team member whose turn it was to answer gave an even more puzzling response: “Benjamin Franklin.”

Franklin was one of the most important of our Founding Fathers, but he never sought the Presidency.  When voters went to the polls in 1788 to elect the first President, Franklin was 82 years old – and in failing health to boot.  Like most people – but not all, as recent history demonstrates – he had the self-awareness to realize that someone as old and frail as he was had no business running for President.

If he had ever been President, old Ben would have been a good bet to make the Family Feud list.  Franklin never married, so he certainly met the “single and ready to mingle” test.  And while he certainly didn’t look like a ladies’ man, appearances can be deceiving. 

Appearances can be deceiving!

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Unlike some men, Franklin didn’t limit himself to women younger than he was – he appreciated des femmes d'un certain âge.

In fact, in a letter titled “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress,” Franklin identified a number of advantages to older paramours – among other things, they are better conversationalists, are less likely to become pregnant, and exhibit “greater prudence in conducting an intrigue.”

Ben went on to offer an explicit evaluation of the physical advantages and disadvantages of high-mileage mistresses:

The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one.  And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

I’m convinced!

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So who was the last President on the Family Feud list?  Good ol’ Thomas Jefferson – our third President.

Like Franklin (not to mention Clinton and JFK), Jefferson was a big fan of extramarital sex.  We’ll have more to say about Jefferson’s famous affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, in the next 2 or 3 lines.

In the meantime, click here to enjoy “The President Has a Sex Tape,” which was released by K. Flay in 2017.

Click here to buy “The President Has a Sex Tape” from Amazon.