THEM PUSSY GRABBERS: a Presidential poem (after Mason Williams)

How about them pussy grabbers

Ain't no wussies

Gettin around just

Grabbin they pussies

Grabbin them young uns

Grabbin them old

Grabbin lotsa pussies

Takin they hold

Them Presidential pussy grabbers
Walkin down the street

Chompin they tic tacs til

They breath smell sweet

Sayin they TV stars

Really nothin to it

Walkin up to wimmens

Always let em do it

How to be a pussy-grabber?

Wanna take a stab?

Find yourself a pussy

Say 'I'm President!' & grab!

Note: It occurred to me recently that our current President, who may well destroy satire along with the rest of the world, had walked himself right into a Mason Williams 'Them' Poem. Williams, best known for his song Classical Gas, is a multi-talented musician, writer, and stand up comic. He was head writer on The Smothers Brothers comedy show, where he conceived the Pat Paulson for President campaign (which seems prescient now), and gave Steve Martin his first break as a writer. He wrote poems and suchlike, and in 1969 published The Mason Williams Reading Matter, which included a section called 'Them Poems', which all began with 'them'. The most famous was Them Tummy Gummers, which I think became a song, but my favourite was the shortest of them Them poems: Them Hors d'oeuvres (pronounced whores doovers), which I have repeated at countless receptions and parties over the decades. I reprint it below. If I stole Mason Williams' Trumpian thunder in any way, I apologise.

from Them Poems

LII  

Them Hors d'oeuvres 

How about Them Hors d'oeuvres,
Ain't they sweet?
Little piece a cheese,
Little piece a meat.

JUDY CARNE: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Judy Carne, the 'sock it to me' girl on Laugh-In, is online at the Guardian now: you can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. It was maybe the saddest obit I've had to write; I recall Carne as someone closer to Julie Andrews than, say, Twiggy, which was the kind of thing Laugh-In was looking for from Goldie Hawn, as well as Carne. But it always seemed to me that she was underused and that 'sock it to me', like much of Laugh-In was a lame joke that got lamer as it went along.

I always found the show too much like a studio executive's idea of what young hip people should be, and although the quick-cutting format was chaotic and different, the humour was largely mainstream and safe. Rowan and Martin themselves I described as stand-ins for the TV audience, but they were also playing those executives. And I meant the word 'leering'. The British influence on Laugh-In was strong; in turn it influenced many shows, from Monty Python to Saturday Night Live (Lorne Michaels worked on Laugh-In).

Oddly, their more 'sophisticated' competition, the Smothers Brothers, who courted actual controversy with network censors, were very much like Rowan and Martin in the sense of Tommy playing the Jerry Lewis character, but they were folk singers, not lounge lizards.

You can see the way Judy Carne was displayed on screen going back to her earliest work, and there was always a sense of unsettledness, perhaps desperation, about her. I had originally written that the divorce from Reynolds was a tabloid sensation in 1966; it may have done more for Reynolds' career than Carne's. I probably should have mentioned that she did do a 25th anniversary Laugh-In show in 1993--she wasn't a total recluse or anything like that. And I do wish the Guardian had kept my ending:  'I was a Sixties flower-child who refused to grow up,' was how she characterised herself; sadly her Sixties fame drew less on her talent than on that nature. RIP