FLY PAPER

When I taught my Cinema Studies elective classes, I would always devote time to one of Buster Keaton's masterpieces--Sherlock, Jr. Early in the feature, Buster enters a candy store to purchase a box of chocolates for a girl he is wooing and accidentally becomes attached to a piece of fly paper. Chaos ensues.

My students had no idea what fly paper was, so I had to explain that before the days of universal air conditioning, many stores and homes would leave doors and windows open and house flies would swarm near any food sources. Owners would put down a piece of paper or hang a paper strip saturated in a sticky, sweet, tar-like adhesive, and the flies would be unable to resist and unable to take off once they had landed. Sometimes you'd see sheets that had been out for a while and were covered with the carcasses of decomposing flies. It wasn't a pretty sight. But the stickiness allowed for wonderful sight-gag possibilities. You can see what Buster does with the opportunity starting at minute 3:00 of the film (below):

But what I am sharing today is a comic tune known as "Fly Paper" that was sung by children when I was a small child. As I grew older, I never encountered anyone familiar with the ditty, and only once did I ever see anything online that may have alluded to it, and that was twenty years ago and never to be seen again. Recently, I tried a search again and found two connections. The first was the basis for the melody. Apparently, the song's composer "sampled" a silly Ella Fitzgerald recording from 1950 called "Molasses, Molasses, (It's Icky Sticky Goo)" and rewrote the lyrics. As I recall, they went something like this:

Fly Paper, Fly Paper,

Icky Sticky Goo

Fly Paper, Fly Paper

It will stick to you

I met a man

Who lived in the sewer

And in the sewer he died

They didn't know what to call it

So they called it Sewer-cide

There were more lyrics, but these are the ones I remembered. Further research suggests that the song originated as a "camp song" in the 1950s, when groups of campers would sing nonsense songs around the campfire. Here are the lyrics from a Yeshiva camp song as recalled by a former camper from that time, sung to the melody Miss Ella provided:

Fly paper, fly paper ooey, gooey goo.

Fly paper, fly paper always sticks to you.

A man was standing by the sewer

And by the sewer he died.

They didn’t know what to call it,

So the called it “sewer-cide”.

Fly paper, fly paper ooey, gooey goo.

Fly paper, fly paper always sticks to you.

A man was standing by his house,

And by his house he died.

They didn’t know what to call it,

So the called it “home-i-cide”.

Fly paper, fly paper ooey, gooey goo.

Fly paper, fly paper always sticks to you.

I woke up in the morning and looked upon the wall,

The roaches and the bedbugs were playing a game of ball.

The score was six to nothing, the roaches were ahead.

The bedbugs hit a grand-slam that knocked me out of bed.

Fly paper, fly paper ooey, gooey goo.

Fly paper, fly paper always sticks to you.

A man was standing by the tracks

And didn’t see the train.

Yisgadal v’yisgadach sh’mei rabah, amen.

Hey, fly paper, fly paper ooey, gooey goo.

Fly paper, fly paper always sticks to you.

That line at the end of the penultimate stanza is taken from the "Mourner's Kaddish", intoned when Jews commemorated the life of one who has passed. I'm sure that lyric was never part of the song I remembered, but many of the other lyrics likely were.

Mystery solved thanks to the Internet! And, it must be said, they don't write songs like this anymore!