IN ALL SERIOUSNESS, last week’s column dealt with double entendre in calypso and its producers’ vain and untrue claim that any indecency is in the listener’s mind, thereby showing their ignorance about the real meaning of the term.
(Incidentally, I messed up the French pronunciation a bit. I should have written something like “doobl aw(n)taw(n)dr(e)”, with the vowel sound in the latter word’s first two syllables being pronounced like the last syllable of bouffant – so difficult to represent phonetically without using arcane symbols.)
Anyway, during the week I wondered about Sparrow’s A Slight Mistake. Is it double entendre?
The persona got his sister to buy a pair of gloves. The sister also bought herself a pair of long underwear.
Unfortunately, the parcels got mixed up, and he got the sister’s parcel, which he then posted – without checking – with a letter he had written to his girlfriend about the gloves.
My love, please accept this humble gift for your birthday / I bought them because I saw you were not wearing none last Friday . . .
And: I bought them at Independence Square from a girl name Evelyn / Who showed me a very special pair that she was wearing / She told me is over three weeks now since she had them on / I bent and examined them myself – they were hardly worn . . .
My love, when you put them on use a little powder / It will make your stay in them comfortable and so much better / When they get damp it’s alright / Hang them out in the sunlight / They won’t shrink or tear / If you wash them ’bout once a year.
This song differs from most double entendre songs in these ways: (1) It is not about crassly viewed sex; (2) the two strands each make sense to an intelligent person and require a fair amount of thought to sustain (3) it does not display out and out vulgarity.
All the same, it still probably possesses a transient humour and a hint of puerility – unlike high-class humour, which evidences, for example, a keen eye for irony, alertness to the cockeyed aspects of life, brilliant cleverness, insightful exaggeration, the mining of story, and organizational astuteness.
Is Slight Mistake as engagingly funny as Duke’s naked man story (Freaking Streaking)?
If yuh see de crowd – yuh cahn stick a pin / Some laughing aloud and some giggling / A fella t’ief a jeep and driving away / Mash he brakes to peep, they jam ’im right dey / A woman nearby they call Madam Trim / Take off she headtie to cover ’im / “Put dis ’round yuh waist, man have some respect / ’E nod ’e head and ’e tie it around ’e neck.
A bank clerk name Ann in big trouble now / Because she recognize de man but shame to say how / “He’s a big businessman” is all she admit / She friend tell she, “Yes girl, ah seeing it / But like ’e business drop so before ’e fail / ’E just advertising ’e having sale.”
Not lewd and crude. Not double entendre.
But funny.
And here’s the brilliant fantasticalness of Spoiler
in Money In The Bank: My cousin died many years in Toco / And she left a lot o’ money for Spoilo / Now people saying that ah lousy / Saying that de Spoiler don’t spend his money / But if yuh put de world in a fish oil tin / Ah cannot even pay a cent to see de t’ing spin.
Just because ah had me money in de bank since the age o’ nine / And dem big shots put theirs on mine / Ah have to wait again for a couple years / In order to get out mine they have to take out theirs.
What about a creative twist on life via Trinidad’s Lord Commander in No Crime No Law: For if somebody don’t buss somebody face / How the policeman going to make a case? / And if somebody don’t dig out somebody eye / The magistrate wouldn’t have nobody to try / And if somebody don’t kill somebody dead / All the judges got to beg their bread / So when somebody cut off somebody head / Instead of hanging, they should pay them money instead.
Yuh got to laugh – and it en obscene.
In Cypher’s Papers, he begs the photographers of the Express and the Guardian not to take pictures of the calypsonians in the calypso tent, because of what happens to the calypsonians afterwards – something to do with no toilet paper:
Now hear what happen in Caroni / A child say, “Mum, me belly calling me” / De mother say, “Chile, you looking so / Look it have Guardian paper; take it and go,” / Well, you know Caroni doh have plenty rain / De chile take all o’ we and gone in de cane / Man, if de photograph coulda cry / You would only hear, “Pepper in me eye, pepper in me eye.”
You know, they say laughter is the best medicine. But hardly if it is pulling at your private parts.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became
a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and
an editor. Email [email protected].
