The Jolly Switzer

My April 27 post "Jupiter, eight-spoked wheel, Ides of March" featured a person named Gaylord, and Bill left a comment exploring various meanings of the word gay and connecting it with -- care to guess? -- Pharazon, who was "gay" in the archaic sense of being "decked out in finery."

I have two main associations with the word gay as used before the sexual revolution: Nietzsche's The Gay Science (which I always make sure to shelve next to his Ecce Homo) and a song called "The Jolly Switzer." This comes from an older generation of Mormon children's songs, but when I was very young there was one older gentleman in our ward who taught it to a few kids, who taught it to others, and it became an underground hit. We were too young to be aware of the psychiatric meaning of gay; we just thought it was a funny song. The old man pronounced Switzer with a long i, and so we did, too. The lyrics, such as they are, run as follows:

I'm a gay tra, la, la,

With my fa, la, la, la,

And my bright, and my gay tra, la, lee;

Then a laugh, ha, ha, ha,

And a ring, ting, ting, ling,

And a sing, fa, la, la, la, la, lee.

Looking up the song now just to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the whole thing, I find that the lyrics are attributed to Bret Harte. Wait, surely not the Bret Harte, celebrated and much-anthologized writer of Wild West fiction? Are you telling me he wrote "The Jolly Switzer," too? A regular Renaissance man! Apparently, yes, it's the same Bret Harte. I find this very satisfying, much like the discovery that the John Bongiovi who sang "R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas" was none other than the future Jon Bon Jovi in his debut as a recording artist.

I searched Harte's Wikipedia page but unsurprisingly found no mention of his contribution to Mormon children's music. Looking under "Dramatic and musical adaptations," though, I did discover that the 1975 spaghetti Western Four of the Apocalypse is based on a couple of Bret Harte's stories. The Four Horsemen are a recurring theme around here and were just mentioned again in my last post, "Into the mouth of the whale."

I also thought it interesting that Bill's comment that led me to look up "The Jolly Switzer" was on a post whose title includes both "Jupiter" and "Ides of March." Jolly and jovial are synonyms, with the latter word literally meaning "under the influence of the planet Jupiter." The name Bret recently came up in "Bret Michaels" (April 19), about a singer who was born on the Ides of March.

When I searched my blog for bret just now, I found only one post that wasn't referencing that recent Bret Michaels post: "Black men and old ones" (March 2025), referencing "the Bret Easton Ellis character Patrick Bateman." Realizing I know essentially nothing about Ellis (I know of Patrick Bateman via cultural osmosis but have never actually read American Psycho), I did a quick Google search to find out what else he had written. This came up:

Yes, that's yet another instance of the "Red and blue spectacles," on the cover of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero. Just prior to writing this post, I had checked Synlogos and found a new post by Vox Day also called "Less Than Zero" (referring to his own anti-evolution AI slop book Probability Zero).

Remembering that I had used a Patrick Bateman "dubs guy" meme here recently, I looked it up. The post is "My plan for a sync experiment" (January 28), where Bateman is pointing to a logo that says "Double Well." I just brought up "Well Well" -- specifically two repetitions of the word, not the more usual three -- in the comments on "Happy God Is a Whale Day."