An old parody
Aug. 15th, 2012 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomSo, several years ago I was in a production of the play Twelve Angry Jurors, which is better known as Twelve Angry Men when it has an all-male cast. It was the "Small Fall" play at Penn—a short play produced at the beginning of the school year by the Theater Arts Council in order to get freshmen interested in Penn theater.
The set included a long narrow table that the jurors were all sitting around, and at one point during tech week, one member of the cast said that sitting at that table made her want to start singing "La Vie Boheme" from Rent.
And I got to thinking... "twelve angry men" sounds a lot like "la vie boheme"... so I went home and wrote a parody.
I haven't posted it before now because I figured that, in order to understand the references in the lyrics, you have to be pretty closely familiar with the script of Twelve Angry Men. But I showed the parody to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kepod the other day, and despite not having seen Twelve Angry Men (or Rent) she seemed to get a kick out of it. So in case anyone else is interested, here it is—I only parodied the first three verses, not the introduction or bridges, but I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to match the structure of the original song's complicated rhyme scheme, assonances, and puns.
To violent confrontations, asking questions,
making something out of nothing,
the need to debate, to deliberate,
to getting to strut and fret,
getting upset,
getting mad,
To heightened tension,
dissension,
to lack of comprehension,
to seeing one dimension, wild invention, seeking attention,
not to mention, of course, seeking more votes than you had,
To casting your vote to forfeit a young man's life,
to strife,
to no matching knife,
to matching knife,
to votes,
to not taking notes,
to stabbing your own dad,
To listening to everyone
except juror ten,
Twelve angry men!
*****
To strange-looking knives bought in junk shops down the street,
to pitchers, to pictures, to windows, sweat, and heat,
to movies, to el trains, to facts you misconstrue,
to hands on the wristwatch of juror number two,
Frustration, quotation,
to timing re-creation,
discretion, confession,
predictable aggression,
To friction, constriction,
conviction (if it's quick),
to outbursts, to outrage,
to any dirty trick,
Truth, lies, doubt, and personal attacks—
prejudice!
Slum kids!
What about facts?
To worry!
To fury!
To a hung jury too!
A lady in the ghetto looked out of her window,
and guess what happened then?
Twelve angry men!
*****
Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, six days' argument,
embarrassment, intense harrassment,
rants, violent parents,
fairy tales, chair details, stairway rails, the downward angle,
unanimity, unfairness,
to social awareness,
To apathy, to enmity, the elderly, amnesty—
Shortened tempers!
The judge!
This is A-B-C!
To no shame when you're playing the blame game—
"I'm gonna kill you!"
To wait and see
fights between Eight and Three—
Small Fall at Penn!
Twelve angry men!
The set included a long narrow table that the jurors were all sitting around, and at one point during tech week, one member of the cast said that sitting at that table made her want to start singing "La Vie Boheme" from Rent.
And I got to thinking... "twelve angry men" sounds a lot like "la vie boheme"... so I went home and wrote a parody.
I haven't posted it before now because I figured that, in order to understand the references in the lyrics, you have to be pretty closely familiar with the script of Twelve Angry Men. But I showed the parody to
kepod the other day, and despite not having seen Twelve Angry Men (or Rent) she seemed to get a kick out of it. So in case anyone else is interested, here it is—I only parodied the first three verses, not the introduction or bridges, but I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to match the structure of the original song's complicated rhyme scheme, assonances, and puns.To violent confrontations, asking questions,
making something out of nothing,
the need to debate, to deliberate,
to getting to strut and fret,
getting upset,
getting mad,
To heightened tension,
dissension,
to lack of comprehension,
to seeing one dimension, wild invention, seeking attention,
not to mention, of course, seeking more votes than you had,
To casting your vote to forfeit a young man's life,
to strife,
to no matching knife,
to matching knife,
to votes,
to not taking notes,
to stabbing your own dad,
To listening to everyone
except juror ten,
Twelve angry men!
*****
To strange-looking knives bought in junk shops down the street,
to pitchers, to pictures, to windows, sweat, and heat,
to movies, to el trains, to facts you misconstrue,
to hands on the wristwatch of juror number two,
Frustration, quotation,
to timing re-creation,
discretion, confession,
predictable aggression,
To friction, constriction,
conviction (if it's quick),
to outbursts, to outrage,
to any dirty trick,
Truth, lies, doubt, and personal attacks—
prejudice!
Slum kids!
What about facts?
To worry!
To fury!
To a hung jury too!
A lady in the ghetto looked out of her window,
and guess what happened then?
Twelve angry men!
*****
Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, six days' argument,
embarrassment, intense harrassment,
rants, violent parents,
fairy tales, chair details, stairway rails, the downward angle,
unanimity, unfairness,
to social awareness,
To apathy, to enmity, the elderly, amnesty—
Shortened tempers!
The judge!
This is A-B-C!
To no shame when you're playing the blame game—
"I'm gonna kill you!"
To wait and see
fights between Eight and Three—
Small Fall at Penn!
Twelve angry men!
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 01:57 am (UTC)Do you consider "worry," "fury," and "jury" to rhyme? What does it say about me that I think the latter two do, but that they do not rhyme with the former? (I figure you are exactly the right person in whose journal it feels appropriate to bring this up.)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 02:42 am (UTC)As for worry vs. fury and jury: first off, I agree with you that fury and jury unambiguously rhyme, and whether worry rhymes with both of them is more ambiguous and/or dialect-dependent. (I could claim that the same is true for Uta, Buddha, and Neruda, but it's not actually quite the case.)
To go into more detail, I'll use the "lexical set" keywords developed by John Wells for referring to individual vowel phonemes.
Jury and fury have the CURE vowel phoneme. Worry originally has the STRUT phoneme, but in most dialects of American English, the STRUT vowel, when it occurs before /r/, has become identical to the NURSE phoneme. In another subset of dialects, the NURSE and CURE are merged or in the process of merging. So for speakers who have both of these mergers, worry will rhyme with jury and fury because the pre-/r/ STRUT vowel and the CURE vowel have both merged into NURSE. For speakers who don't have both, they won't rhyme. (Merging CURE into FORCE instead of into NURSE is also very common.)
Personally, I mostly have the NURSE/CURE merger, but I don't have the pre-/r/ STRUT/NURSE merger. But I've also always (mis)pronounced worry with the NORTH vowel or something too, and didn't notice that everyone else was using the the STRUT or NURSE vowel until it was too late for me to want to change it.