Excluding Mother Goose rhymes and such melodic strands of our cultural DNA as The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row Row Your Boat, whose “life is but a dream” became my introduction to the wisdom of the East (although I did not know it at the time), and Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which somehow sprang from my toddler unconsciousness without ever being learnt, this was the first real song I was taught to sing:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
It was a real song in the sense that none of the other children I knew sang it and in the sense that it was my first sophisticated song. It was apparent to me, as it was not, yet, for The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, that there was something subversive about My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
My first hint may have been the undisguised glee with which Uncle Norman and Uncle Aaron taught it to me and drilled me in it until I had the confidence to stand up in a room of adults and sing it. My suspicions were confirmed when my uncles taught me an addendum.
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank.
She lit up a match for to see.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
Realizing that the adults – with the exception of my mother, who was not quite sure of its propriety – preferred my uncles’ addendum was a learning experience.
I had assumed their addendum was of their own invention, but it turns out that it was simply the Poughkeepsie Variant or Hudson Valley Variant or Northeast Corridor Variant of a burlesque devised long ago by some anonymous card. An early example:
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
The height of its contents to see;
I lighted a match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
My uncle’s version is far superior to any of the others. It is the only one which achieves its goal – to deride the sentimentalism of the original – by artfully turning the last couplet of the first stanza into a refrain, and a deliciously gory double-entendre.
At some point, my uncles explained to me what the effect would be of lighting a match while examining a gas tank, and I realized that they’d made the story of poor Bonnie into slapstick. I had not yet been in a movie theater, but I was familiar with the genre from birthday parties. The climax of any birthday party, if the parents were at all up-to-date, was watching the birthday child’s father’s hilarious attempts to operate a Rube Goldberg device known as an 8mm movie projector.
Usually the machine eventually would yield to torturous prodding and mild persiflage and cast a few snagless minutes of the merry mayhem of Felix the Cat, Tom and Jerry or Charlie Chaplin – until the film broke or, even more fun, caught fire – onto a knobby silvery screen which had been erected – with almost as much amusing adult aggravation as accompanied the operation of the projector – at the end of a table cluttered with plates of melting ice cream and gobs of yellow and blue or pink cake.
The great thing about slapstick was that it was humor that could be enjoyed equally by children and adults. In that way, it was the opposite of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean; there was nothing subtle about slapstick. I did not try to analyze why misrule – the flaunting of both civil, moral and physical laws – could unite a group of children and a group of adults in a common sense of pleasure like nothing else could, but the fact that this was the case was another learning experience.
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