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.