What comes after Fünf?
Just a quick annotation on Neil’s last post, “What comes after Fourth.” The title makes an (obscure) allusion to a comic routine by early 20th century British music hall comedian “Monsewer” Eddie Gray, who was known for his trademark “Cockney-French” where he spoke on the stage in very bad French.
One can only imagine that this played very well to British audiences between the wars! (Not that bad French accents seem to have ever gone out of style in British comedy.)
We saw a clip not long ago of Monsewer Eddie in a stage performance that I believe dates to the 1920′s. He boasts about how his somewhat dim assistant can speak German, and the assistant counts out loud up to five:
Assistant: Eins, Zwei, Drei, Fier, Fünf.
Monsewer Eddie: What comes after Fünf?
Assistant: Fünf und half!
The facts that Neil and I both have a soft spot for vaudville-style comedy, and that Monsewer Eddie also somehow reminds us of Neil’s dad, makes him extra delightful to us. (Your mileage may vary.)
And thus the correct answer to “What comes after Fourth?” would be: “Fourth and a half!”
I couldn’t track down the Fünf-und-half routine, but here is a clip from what looks to be the same performance.
If you need to know what’s a henway, or what’s a grecian urn, you know where to reach us.
4 comments
Hellooooooo from Canada. Will follow you around the country and get excited when you get near Kelowna. Love your political commentaries. Ever thought about writing for the newpapers?
Hey gorgeous! Lovely to see you here.
My health isn’t reliable enough to make me a good candidate for anything that’s deadline driven at the moment. Part of the motivation for this trip is to get me to a climate where I can rebuild my health so I can take on projects like this.
If I find that I wind up writing “real” travel updates regularly when we’re really hitting the road (in the fall), maybe I’ll hit up the CBC or the Kelowna papers and see if they’d like travel content… I used to write “foreigner’s eye view” pieces for a magazine when I lived in Japan, and it was a lot of fun.
The infamous Donna B . . . we meet at last
Glad it’s finally happened, even if it’s virtual (although, the last time I met someone virtual, it turned into a very REAL marriage. . .)
We will definitely get into Kelowna-visiting range, so bank on visits.
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