ITS HARD TO know how to explain Flanders and Swann ...
Though they had been in variety shows before 1950, they hit their stride with At the Drop of a Hat, which ran for 750 performances in London in the late 50s. They performed a few more shows in the 60s (including At the Drop of Another Hat), but nothing that quite came up to the original Hat.
What they presented wasn't so much a string of specific satires, as a way of looking at things. That's why songs with specific references to the time ("Song of Reproduction," about obsessions with early hi-fi systems, and "Design for Living," about House and Garden craziness) keep their timeless quality. Even in their animal songs ("The Gnu Song," "The Hippopotamus"), they deal with universal human foibles stretched to extremes.
"Misalliance," for example, uses the romance between a bindweed and a honeysuckle to hilariously skewer political and social bias. "The Reluctant Cannibal," ("I won't eat people/Eating people is wrong") plays skittering games with generational conflict, social attitude and human tunnel vision without getting the least bit preachy.
Some?and some of the most effective?are just plain goofy. "A Happy Song" is mostly a chorus of absurd sound effects. One of my favorites, "Tried by the Centre Court," is just a semi-rhymed monologue by Flanders as a tennis umpire who happens to hate the game ("They are bashing a ball with the gut of a cat"). And "Madeira M'Dear" (picked up by the Kingston Trio, my wife recalls) is the quintessential dirty-old-man song.
Flanders, who'd had polio, was confined to a wheelchair. Swann, who hadn't, wasn't, but I don't quite understand him. I saw him once, at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia?not in performance, but getting a prize or something, talking to people at a reception. He was a friendly but mousey little man who reminded me of a Michael Palin character, the accountant who wants to be a lion tamer.
Swann put to music J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth poems?one in Elvish?in a stunningly beautiful edition, The Road Goes Ever On (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), with commentary and Elvish lettering by Tolkien. (I have virtually every book connected to Middle Earth that Tolkien had a hand in.) Swann's foreword is, again, friendly, but oddly prissy. By contrast, his stage persona sounds like a demented chipmunk.
I definitely recommend At the Drop of a Hat to anyone remotely interested in good, live stage humor. The only problem is, three live versions were issued originally?two in England, one in the U.S. ?and now there appear to be two CD reissues, one from a British version, one from the U.S. I have a tape of the U.S. CD, but only the British one is readily available now.
It's further muddled because both CDs had exactly the same listing of tracks?missing two of my favorites from the U.S. version, adding later material that is mostly not as good. It may not make much difference in the songs, but Flanders' patter varies. So you may not find some of my favorite throwaways. Introducing "The Hippopotamus": "Some people may think the title of this song is irrelevant, but it's not irrelevant?it's a hippopotamus!" And describing the 16th-century reaction to the written lyrics of "Greensleeves": "Greenfleeves?that's a strange name?for a fong."
What's Out There: Besides the British Hat, there are three or four show compilations. For more discographic confusion, see timothyplatypus.tripod.com/FaS/, the Flanders and Swann semi-official site.