Everybody must know “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” back to front
by now – for me, it was the first film I remember seeing in a cinema, and was
watched every day once it arrived on home video. Therefore, we can all picture
the scene where Doctor Doom walks into the Cloverleaf tram station bar, looking
for Roger, who has been hidden in a back room by Eddie Valiant. Doom then
starts tapping out a rhythm on the wall, knowing all too well that a “toon”
cannot leave it unanswered.
With his final attempt at tapping the rhythm out, Doom
utters the phrase most often spoken in time with it: “shave and a haircut…”
Roger, unable to take it, explodes through the wall, yelling
in answer, “two bits!”
For me, that was the first time I really became aware of a
rhythm that is so ubiquitous, it isn’t clear who made it up in the first place
– Wikipedia places an early use of the phrase in a song from 1899, Charles
Hale’s “At a Darktown Cakewalk,” while the phrase may have been established by the
time the novelist Joel Sayre used it to describe boats tooting their horns, in
“Hizzoner the Mayor” (1933). For those thinking the musical phrase was as
cockney-sounding as Danny Dyer, the news is might be American in origin might
be a bit disappointing, but because it is so ubiquitous that this cannot be
proved either, Chas and Dave can continue to rest safe.
Even if I could not find the origin of this earworm, I have
found a missed opportunity. On an episode of “QI,” Danny Baker asserted that
the two Voyager probes, both of which have now left the Solar System, included
the first part of “Shave and a Haircut” on the gold-plated copper records bolted
to them, in the hope that alien life will discover them, take the records out
of their aluminium bags, play the record, and answer “two bits.”
I wish it were true, having checked the contents online –
this worked for American prisoners of war in Vietnam, to check if the people in
the room next door were friend or foe but, at least, they do get the “da-da-da-daaah”
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony instead.