Talk:My Melancholy Baby

Can you play "Melancholy Baby"?

   I was a bit surprised to realize that Melancholy Baby covers a film of that title, and not a Rdr to the song (with a

This article is about the song. For the film, see Melancholy Baby (film).

HatNote), but that was just a sidelight for me.
   My real surprise is that even tho Google has 46 distinct hits for

"can you play melancholy baby"

nearly all of them just use it as a non-sequitur. I guess that includes a Christopher Durang monolog where he says it to a street musician who offers him help when Durang has been knocked down by a car.
   But here's the one that hints at what i was looking for:

"Bella Notte" is a pretty song, a very pretty song, but I can't walk a hundred feet with an accordion strapped to my shoulders without someone asking me to play it. It's like in the old movies, where the drunk in the back calls out "Can you play 'Melancholy Baby'?"

   "Water, water, everywhere, yet all the boards did shrink." I don't think i saw any of the movies our article mentions, and even if i heard Monkees songs on the radio, i swear i never stayed in a room where the TV show was on. Hogan's Heroes, yes, and perhaps that's the only place i learned that trope, but like the accordionist, i associate it with movies.
   Which old movies, and did i actually see more than one of them? And which one was the first to document that as the epitome of the hapless drunkard? And was that bit of behavior a screenwriter's (or dramatist's or comedian's) dead-on characterization of what kind of song appeals to the mental state of the hapless drunk, or was that specific song actually the number-one song requested by hapless drunks, at some point in the 20th century?
--Jerzy•t 05:46, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

   Aha! The drunk doesn't say "Can you...", but just "Play 'Melancholy Baby'"!; these are the most helpful hits among the first 30 "of about 2,220 results":

• When he felt blue, instead of asking the piano player to play "Melancholy Baby," he would ask me to tell about the Friendly Inn, Madam Schang, my debut at Coney Island, the Mississippi train wreck, Pete Penovitch, or the Musical Cow Milker ...
• We had to depart rapidly when one of the enlisted men from our ship insisted that the band play “Melancholy Baby”. He was very drunk.
• ...there was a box on top of the piano for any extra gratuities the customers cared to donate. You'd be surprised how many times one has to play Melancholy Baby under those circumstances!
• ... [She] recalls, "He and everyone else there laughed when I told them that's what I was going to sing [for her audition]. They thought I was kidding." (Indeed, the song title itself has become a cliché over the decades: "Hey, play “Melancholy Baby!”")
• ...farshnoshket describes a state in which the drinker is demanding that the band play "Melancholy Baby" while he weeps into someone else's beer.

   I think it would be OR to claim that the song is maudlin in its sentimentality. On the other hand, the existing 'graph

Judy Garland sang it during the "Born in a Trunk" sequence in the 1954 movie A Star Is Born, after a drunk persistently shouted, "Sing 'Melancholy Baby'!" Similar scenes with hecklers appeared in 1960s American television programs like The Monkees and Hogan's Heroes, although the song was not always sung in response.

gave examples where media portray or perceive it in relation with combinations of drunkenness, sentimentality, and loss of social perspective, and these 5 hits and maybe something like 16% of the other 2,200 hits (say, 350 of them) may serve to broaden our coverage of such portrayals and perceptions of interest in the song.
--Jerzy•t 08:03, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I came to this article hoping it might shed some light on the origin of the 'traditional joke', occurring in numerous TV shows, of someone, usually a drunk, asking a singer/musician, with no apparent context, "Can you play..." or "Do you know Melancholy Baby?", which reached a kind of 'culmination' in a 1970s Julie Andrews TV special where a "drunk" Muppet asks her the catchphrase question, to which she unexpectedly replies to the effect, "As a matter of fact, I do!", and proceeds to sing the song. (BTW one example earlier than the Monkees episode is the early 1966 I Dream of Jeannie episode "My Master, the Doctor" in which Jeannie demonstrates how she can make Captain Nelson a master violinist, prompting Captain Healey to ask, "Do you know 'Melancholy Baby'?") It appears from the article, anyway, that the origin would be based on parodying Judy Garland's A Star Is Born. 2601:545:8201:6290:1973:F83F:B55D:83FB (talk) 14:49, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Parody (off topic)

Statesville Record & Landmark › 17 February 1966 › Page 2 ... took me to www.newspapers.com/newspage/3062024/ ‎ and this scrap of flaky OCR:

-0— MATZOHBALL, by Sol Weln- steln (Pocktt Books, 126 pagti, $1.00) Israel Bond, Hebrew Secret Agent Oy-Oy-7, did ... For human interest there is the sacred melon rite hi which the goddess Mother Kali must be appeased by the ripe fruit ...

The novel in question, also appearing in Playboy in the late '60s, is briefly described at Matzohball ad, but what you apparently won't find on the Web, and all you really want to know, is that the appeasement of Kali involves a sacrifice of a melon, presented to the goddess with the hip incantation "Come and get your melon, Kali, baby."
--Jerzy•t 08:43, 23 September 2013 (UTC)