Boogedy, boogedy, boogey!

Remember the Marx Brothers “Night of the Opera”?

It was a swell movie. It had class while making a mockery of class. It had its own style. Something about the movie, like other Marx Brothers movies showed it was not mandatory to respect authority… in fact it was more fun not to.

They were slapstick anarchists.

The Marx Brothers had so much more pizzazz than the Three Stooges. There humor was blunders and hitting each other. The Marx Brothers did calculated evil to snobs and hit them, not each other… after all, they had to respect something.

In Night of the Opera when a horrible looking witch-like character was singing her operatic notes Grocho jumps from private balcony seat area to another and when he landed amid the dignified people sitting there watching the opera he put his hands on each side of his temple and with fingers opened, said, “Boogedy, boogedy, boogey!” and went on to another antic. That act burned an impression in our minds. We were impressed.

When we saw that – I forgot where, it was too old to be at the movies, so we must have been at someone’s house watching TV and saw Grocho say “Boogedy boogedy boogey!” we cracked up laughing.

To suddenly raise both hands to your ears and spread out our fingers and quickly say “Boogedy, boogedy, boogey!” became an art among our little group. Timing was everything. It worked best when it wasn’t expected and out of context. Some of us became quiet good at it.

Those were the days!