Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich – "Hold Tight" (1966)

Girl, you suit me for size

Forget the other guys!

I recently stumbled across a 1992 segment from Late Night with David Letterman that featured five elementary school kids telling jokes to Letterman.  Click here if you want to watch it.  (Trust me, you do.)

[NOTE: Did you remember that Letterman’s show was still on NBC in 1992?  Late Night first appeared in 1982, replacing Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Coast to Coast program in the 12:30 am time slot following Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.  Letterman expected to take Carson’s place as the Tonight Show host when Carson retired in 1991, but that job was given to Jay Leno instead.  As a result, Letterman took his show – renamed Late Show with David Letterman – to CBS in 1993.]

My favorite joke from that Late Night segment was the one told by Leonard, a sixth-grader who appears about seven and a half minutes into the segment:

Leonard: What is the difference between a snowman and a snow woman?

Letterman:  I have no idea.

Leonard:  Snowballs!

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Last Sunday, my daughter hosted a 10th birthday party for my oldest grandson, Jack.  Also in attendance were Jack’s two oldest cousins, Tommy (who is nine years old) and Sully (who is eight).

Jack at age two

I couldn’t wait to tell them Leonard’s snowballs joke – in front of my daughter, of course!

My grandsons LOVED the joke.  I’m hoping that they tell it to all their friends when school starts later this month.   

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A couple of weeks ago, I brought Tommy to one of my weekly trivia games.  Tommy is a smart kid, and he knows more than I do about certain topics.  For example, he knows everything there to know about the 2026 World Cup, and he’s an expert on flags as well.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any questions about the World Cup or flags that night.  But a couple of weeks later, the final question – which, like the final question on Jeopardy, is the most important one of the game – was about flags.

Here’s the question:

Situated fewer than 1000 miles apart, which two European nations – whose names contain the same number of letters – use national flags depicting a map of the country itself?

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Do you have any idea what the correct answer to that question is?  I didn’t think so.

Don’t feel bad – we had no idea what the answer was either.  As a result, we finished second instead of first.

When I posed the final question to Tommy after Jack’s birthday party, he didn’t hesitate. “Kosovo and Cyprus,” he said.

The flags of Kosovo and Cyprus

And he was right.  Which means that my dominant trivia team had a seven-week winning streak broken because we were missing my nine-year-old grandson.

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We’ve never had a trivia question about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.  But I’ll be ready for it if we ever do.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich had no fewer than eight top ten hits in the UK.  They sold a lot of records in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands as well.  But they never had a hit in the U.S.

Click here to read about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.

Click here to listen to “Hold Tight,” a #4 hit single in the UK and Germany in 1966.  It’s featured on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film, Death Proof – that’s where I first heard it.

Click here to buy “Hold Tight” from Amazon.