After Donald the Trump posted his Easter screed, threatening Iran like Iran has never been threatened before – big, beautiful threatening, the greatest threatening they’ve ever seen, many people are saying – the Rude Pundit responded in a way more circumspect pundits didn’t dare: “It Should Be a Bigger Story That the President of the United States Is Fucking Insane”.
And that’s the true situation in, you’ll pardon the expression, a nutshell. Rude Pundit includes a link to the transcript of what Trump said at his Easter lunch at the White House, and it’s the babbling of a madman. But acknowledging that makes politicians in Congress and the stenographers in the media uncomfortable because, let’s face it, mental illness makes people uncomfortable.
“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-haaa!” proved that way back in 1966, when a recording engineer named Jerry Samuels released the novelty record under the alias Napoleon XIV. It soared up the charts for five weeks, reaching No. 1 on the sales-based Cashbox chart, before radio stations were pressured to pull it from their playlists – not because it was impolite to make fun of the mentally ill, but because doctors in the field told them it was hurting their image.
Back then people could be involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions more easily than today, and “funny farm” was a snarky, widely employed term for such facilities. If we were living in the 1950s, Donald Trump’s behavior would land him in one. Today we’re more enlightened, so many of the mentally ill live on the streets, or in the White House.
Samuels’ record isn’t considered a song, because it contains no melody or harmony, just drums, hand-claps and a hand-cranked siren. He was aware that his humor could come off as insensitive, so he wrote the final lines to make is seem as if his narrator was addressing a dog instead of a lover. It didn’t really work.
Sales plummeted after the record’s ban, but it was kept alive by frequent play on Dr. Demento’s radio show and compilation LPs. Samuels released other novelty recordings over the years, but none reached the charts or had even minimal cultural impact.
