Also, it really is a long way to Tipperary.
Also #15
Greetings from scenic Fukui Prefecture where the dinosaurs are on display and the fossils are making presentations. Hi. I'm the fossil. It's me. Or at least it was, about a week and some change ago when I first wrote that sentence. It’s been a minute. Bear with me while I get my act together.
About a week ago, I took some time out of my work schedule to travel down to Fukui Prefecture to attend a conference. I made a couple of presentations with different sets of colleagues and they were well received. Everything was pleasant, amiable, fulfilling, gratifying, and utterly, thoroughly exhausting. It’s taken me the better part of two weeks to get mostly caught up.
But all that’s boring. Let’s talk about culture and how we find it. On a recent episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest, the hosts discussed a question from a listener:
What things that you love have you been introduced to by advertising?
These questions got me to thinking about Snoopy. As a kid I spent countless hours tracing newsprint copies of all my favorite comics from the funny pages. My favorites were Snoopy, Beetle Bailey, and Hagar the Horrible. Ziggy and Cathy didn’t do much for me. And Prince Valiant? What the hell was that comic book style illustrated story doing mixed in with my cartoons?
Anyway, for several years during my childhood, we had a small used bookshop just a couple miles from my house. The owners were a pair of elderly retirees and their shop occupied every room of a dilapidated shop down in the worn out, underused historic downtown area. They operated on credit mostly, and I could always find something to read, even if a lot of it was beyond me. I found the original James Bond and M*A*S*H novels there along with dozens of Bradbury, Asimov, and Heinlein stories and even more copies of all the classic adventures any kid could want. I read The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island and even a few books that had nothing to do with islands or pirates or shipwrecks.
But my favorite corner of the store occupied the three shelves closest to the floor in the main room, hidden behind the romance section. There, the humor and comedy books sat relatively undisturbed save for enquiring minds like mine. I found a treasure trove of joke books, back issues of Mad Magazine, and, incredibly, dozens and dozens of comic strip collections. Including one I still have: It's a long way to Tipperary.
Tipperary, it turns out, is a town in Ireland. And the song, “It’s a long way to Tipperary” was written, in 1909, as the lament of a man far from home. It became a popular song in music halls of the era, eventually being used in so many movies and plays that it became a shorthand for the plight of the World War I era soldier. I, of course, knew absolutely none of this.
But Charles Schulz did. Among Snoopy’s many aliases and fantasies, the most persistent and long-running is that of the World War 1 Ace Pilot. Flying in his Sopwith Camel, taking on the Red Baron, and always ending up shot down behind enemy lines in occupied France, Snoopy drowned his sorrows in root beer and tried to find his way home in several storylines over the decades. These storylines eventually transcended the comic strips and became book collections, t.v. specials, and then finally achieved a kind of meta-life as a trope in and of itself. I can directly credit reading these stories with giving me a love of history and an interest in World War I, the fighters of that era, and France.
But the only reason any of this was on my mind is because as I rode the train down to the convention, the only thing my stress-addled mind could focus on was trying to cram the three syllables of Fu-ku-i into the meter: It’s a long way to fuku-uuu-iii!
I’m guilty of worse offenses but not many.
So, while it’s not exactly the same as the question posed to the Slate hosts, I didn’t discover Tipperary, the place or the song, through advertising, I did discover it through other media. On the one hand, duh, we all learn about countless other cultural moments through the media we consume. How many kids today discovered Kate Bush last year because of Stranger Things?
But it’s a question worth asking, even if only of ourselves, because discovering the through lines and routes different ideas have taken through our lives and our consciousnesses can help us understand both ourselves and those around us a little bit better. And that’s always a good thing.
But, oh yeah, P.S., I should note, that in answer to the actual question, a VW Beetle commercial introduced me to Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space and a Mercedes Benz commercial that gave me Marlene Dietrich singing, “Falling in Love Again.” Two songs I love and cars I’ve never even thought about buying. Go figure.
Back soon with more wordy nerdiness. Promise.