Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean
Encyclopedia
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
. First performed by the duo of Gallagher and Shean
Gallagher and Shean
Gallagher & Shean was a highly successful double act on vaudeville and Broadway in the 1910s and 1920s, consisting of Edward Gallagher and Al Shean .-Career:...
in the early 1920s, it became a huge hit and carried Gallagher & Shean to stardom.
It contains jokes typical of the time but also lampoons current fads and events ("Cost of living went so high / That it's cheaper now to die"). The song itself gave rise to many parody versions.
As this song was sung on the vaudeville stage, each verse was presented as a miniature skit, as though Shean came across Gallagher on a street, beginning: "Oh, Mister Gallagher! Oh Mister Gallagher! Have you heard...?" Gallagher would say "Yes, yes" to his entreaties before the joke was set up in the verse.
Though it had absolutely nothing to do with the song (aside from one reference to the Nile
Nile
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
made in one of the original verses that was occasionally used), the two performed the song in Egyptian costume (Gallagher in white suit and pith helmet of the tourist, Shean in fez and bizarre skirted jacket of the "native" colonial), to tap into the craze for all things Egyptian after the discovery of King Tut's
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun , Egyptian , ; approx. 1341 BC – 1323 BC) was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...
tomb.
The refrain at the end of the each verse -- "Positively Mister Gallagher, absolutely Mister Shean!" -- became a well-known catchphrase for many years thereafter. A version was performed on television by Groucho Marx
Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit. His rapid-fire delivery of innuendo-laden patter earned him many admirers. He made 13 feature films with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born...
(Shean's nephew) with Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason
Jackie Gleason was an American comedian, actor and musician. He was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy style, especially by his character Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, a situation-comedy television series. His most noted film roles were as Minnesota Fats in the drama film The...
in the late 1950s, and Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce
Leonard Alfred Schneider , better known by the stage name Lenny Bruce, was a Jewish-American comedian, social critic and satirist...
made off-handed reference to it in his 1960s nightclub act, all of them confident that it would be immediately recognizable to the audience. In the 1974 play Travesties
Travesties
Travesties is a play by Tom Stoppard.The play centres on the figure of Henry Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the...
, by Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
, the characters Gwendolen and Cecily sing a parody version of the song, substituting their own names. As late as the late 1980s the song was the centerpiece of an advertising campaign by the Pitney-Bowes corporation ("Absolutely Mister Pitney, positively Mister Bowes!").
There are several versions of the song, and a long list of verses, as it was occasionally reworked or updated, as was typical of topical vaudeville songs. It was recorded both on a popular 78 rpm disc record and on an early "talkie" film, both of which featured the original performers. The song also is heard in the soundtrack of the feature films Ziegfeld Girl
Ziegfeld girl
Ziegfeld Girls were the chorus girls from Florenz Ziegfeld's theatrical spectaculars known as the Ziegfeld Follies , which were based on the Folies Bergère of Paris....
(1941), in which Shean himself appears, and Atlantic City (1944).
This song inspired at least the jingle associated with the household cleaning product Mr. Sheen
Mr. Sheen
Mr. Sheen is a brand of cleaning materials created in Australia in the 1950s by Samuel Taylor Pty Ltd. It was the first aerosol cleaning product available on the Australian market and helped introduce the use of aerosol products into Australia. The product moved to a British company Reckitt &...
; whether it directly inspired the product name is unknown.