Monday, 24 June 2024
Jubilee Room, Parliament House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC, Governor of New South Wales

Bujari Gamarruwa, Diyn Babana, Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of these lands and waterways, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

Untutored on the subject, I would have expected a reference to a ‘Whiffenpoof’ to yield up a child’s book akin to AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh… As it turns out, I was not so far off the mark.

In the first years of last century there was a comic strip called Little Nemo in Slumberland, published every Sunday in the New York Herald, detailing the surrealist dream-adventures of its protagonist, Little Nemo.^[1] And no, not the fish but – rather – a pyjama-wearing boy, apparently modelled after the artist’s son.^[2]

The comic strip was so popular it spawned its own “extravagant” operetta by Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith, with lavish costumes and effects.^[3]

“The comic hit”^[4] of the wildly successful show was a scene in which Nemo overhears three hunters trying to best each other with fantastical stories of exotic catches. Dr Pill, the quack physician to Morpheus, God of Sleep^[5], trumps all, claiming to be the only man to have killed a whiffenpoof.

“A whiffenpoof?” the others ask, “What’s that?”^[6]

“One of the rarest prehysterical animals”, is the reply, “[with] a body like a catechism and a face like a worm”. Being “ambidexterous” – which the Dr advises means “cannot live either on land or sea” – it is difficult to find and harder to kill, by virtue of its armour “like a peccadillo”.

The trick, the Dr Pill says, is to crawl out onto the water, drill a perfectly circular hole in it, and place beside it a piece of Limburger cheese. Then you hide in the bushes nearby and wait for a Whiffenpoof to crawl out, nibble on the cheese, and swell up so big it can’t fit back in.

“Then you shoot it?” his listeners asked. “No, no, no,”… says Dr Pill:  “You sit on the water and laugh at him till he sees the funny side and then he dies laughing”^[7].

At least, that is what was scripted although on any given night, the three actors would often extemporise for comic effect.

 One night, in the audience in one of the operetta’s 111-show run^[8] was a Yale University student called Denton “Goat” Fowler. He was a member of a group of Yale acapella singers who, every Monday night, would rehearse together in Mory’s Old Temple Bar. They’d become quite popular and thought they deserved a name. Tickled by the story he’d seen in Little Nemo, Goat suggested ‘Wiffenpoof’^[9].

As Reverend Howard, one of the founding members later recounted, it “fitted […] our mood of free and exuberant fancy, and […] was adopted with enthusiasm”^[10]. And the name stuck.^[11]

As a former Whiffenpoof said “[For] the new Whiffenpoofs chosen each year … the choice of repertoire is their own… Because each group starts fresh, it receives a heritage, but also the freedom to … create its own identity.”^[12]

The only downside to this quirky beginning of the wonderful acapella group we are about to hear, had they acted quickly and secured the Nemo copyright, they could have made squillions on-selling the rights to Disney. But there’s always a story of the fish that got away!

So, settle back – taking flight on the wings of musical fancy – to be dazzled by this year’s incarnation of Yale’s famous Whiffenpoofs…

[1] The full-page comic by Winsor McCay, published in the years 1905-11, has been described as a landmark in the development of the comic strip, not only in terms of its sophisticated art nouveau style, but also its surrealist themes and innovations in layout, narrative structure, and breakings of the fourth wall. It featured a serious of recurring characters Nemo would meet in his dreams and the adventures they would have, often comically absurdist, before waking, in the final frame of each escapade in his bed: David M. Kunzle, ‘The First Half of the 20^th Century: the Evolution of the Form’, in Britannica online, available here; ‘Winsor McCay’ entry in Lambiek Comiclopedia online, available here

[2] Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, University of Chicago Press, p.97

[3] ‘Little Nemo’ entry in Gilbert and Sullivan Archive online, available here.

[4] Frederick Tregelles, ‘Little Nemo Spectacle a Decided Hit’, The Evening Item, 7 November 1908, p. 7, available here

[5] Douglas Reside, ‘Musical of the Month: Little Nemo”, New York Public Library online, 29 July 2015, available here

[6] Harry B. Smith, Little Nemo in Slumberland Libretto (1908), available here

[7] Smith, Little Nemo, op. cit. In a case of art imitates life – or, more precisely, art imitates art – the whiffenpoof made its way into the Little Nemo comic the year after its invention in the operetta. Once, when Little Nemo’s father is experiences an hallucinatory breakdown brought on by the monumental size of his wife’s Easter Hat, he pleads with those restraining him, “Just keep those whiffenpoofs away. Will you?”: Windsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, 11 April 1909, available here. In another, Little Nemo and friends come upon a pair of inept hunters (including, ironically, Dr Pill) looking for a “couple of whiffenpoofs” to shoot, instead Nemo witnesses them encountering first a monkey-faced centipede-like ‘Montemaniac’ and a green, brown-spotted, elephant-tusked ‘Penisula’, both of which the hunters completely, and comically, fail to hit: Windsor McCay, ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, 26 September 1909, available here

[8] ‘Little Nemo’ entry in The Guide to Musical Theatre online, available here

[9] Howard, ‘The Whiffenpoofs’, op. cit., p.6

[10] ibid

[11] “The Whiffenpoofs comprise 14 undergraduates attending Yale University who devote a year of their time at Yale, singing their A Capella repertoire around their US home states and in more recent decades a world tour, including Australia. The Whiffenpoofs are steeped in tradition, flair and above all talent. The Whiffs personify making the world a better, happier place by singing in the celebrated A Capella genre”: whiffenpoofs.com/history

[12] Charles Henry Buck III and Robertt Richards Birge, “Yale: A Musical History”, p.42, available here