Pete and Ben investigate how well the Fawlty John Cleese of 1977 matches up with the potentially more cloth-eared John Cleese of 2022, and what the term “cloth-eared” means, anyway. They also investigate the height of the Muppet theatre, where Frank Oz was during this episode, and why both local fireworks and Siri seem to want to interrupt their recording session.

Sources and References:

Ben’s sneaky side-research to see if there had been any Monty Python connection to The Muppet Show in advance of Cleese appearing on the show and then again in The Great Muppet Caper, meant he did a search of Michael Palin’s diaries from the era, which produced scant results.

“Somebody Stole My Gal” features Jerry Nelson doing a very fine impersonation of/tribute to the 1965 vocal stylings of Jim Kweskin, but Ben points out that the frequent asides and commentary does seem to come from the hyper-manic version as performed by Mel Blanc in 1953 in conjunction with Lou Busch and the “Tickle-Toe Four”.

Derek Scott’s album he composed and produced on electronic organ with Jack Parnell, Way In — Way Out, does feature a track that sounds compellingly like his backing track for the shadow puppets on The Muppet Show: give a listen to the preview of “The Whistler”.

Pete primarily knows “So I says to Mabel, I says…” from The Simpsons, and Ben speculated that the reason the Simpsons writers used it was because it had been a feature phrase used by Saturday Night Live performers in the years prior to that episode of The Simpsons airing. Ben found what he thinks is an key source to the belief that Mabel comes from The Great Gatsby in this 2008 answers website, but a search of the full text of Gatsby in both Google Books and Archive.org, there are no results. Ben was able to find “I says to her I says” in Huckleberry Finn, but it is interesting that despite the long slang tradition of the phrase and the use of it on SNL, one of the show’s writers (although not on credited on that specific episode on IMDb, for whatever that’s worth) claims it isn’t a reference to anything at all. None of this has prevented there from being a load of populist, easy-access misinformation about the Gatsby connection to spread, however.

The music hall rendition of “Waiting at the Church” is the final song from the second season that hadn’t yet aired but was included on the UK-only four-song EP of The Muppet Show Music Hall, including the amusing credit of “the Entire Muppet Audience” on the front of the sleeve.

There is actually a Wikipedia entry on Donald Sinclair, the real-life manager of the Gleneagles Hotel that Cleese based Fawlty Towers on, and it confirms the trivia that Cleese’s character in Rat Race shares his name. After completing Fierce Creatures Cleese spent a considerable amount of his star power attempting to help lemurs and used them as the primary icon on his webpage for some time, so the fact that a newly discovered species was named after him didn’t come as too much of a surprise. Cleese’s tweet about his fictional album A Man and his Music is here, and for anyone unfamiliar with the phrase “cloth-eared”, here’s a working definition.

Two interviews with Cleese provide evidence that Cleese was socially connected to Frank Oz but didn’t have a personal friendship with Jim Henson, which provided Ben with reason to speculate as to whether Oz was unavailable considering the strange structure of the Hogthrob-only “Pigs in Space” segment, despite the behind-the-scenes Muppet History picture of Cleese filming the episode with Frank playing Fozzie.

With regard to Ben’s suggested edit of the episode that cuts directly to that “Pigs in Space” segment, Ben refers to a sequence in the Steven Soderbergh film Out of Sight. MovieClips can show you the final edit of the sequence, and a copy of the screenplay will indicate that there were a few more lines of dialogue. The suggestion of the more punchy edit and is on the DVD as is a deleted scene showing the filming of those extra lines.

There are further musings on the word “sesquipedalian” for anyone interested.

Anyone additionally interested in the various versions of Damn Yankees‘ “Two Lost Souls” can check out clips of Gwen Verdon and Tab Hunter doing the song in the film version, Victor Garber and Bebe Neuwirth performing at as a promotion for the 1994 revival, and the Cheyenne Jackson and Jane Krakowski rendition for their City Center production. It does seem to be a fair criticism of the script that Cleese shouts, “I don’t do old show tunes!” about Man of La Mancha, which premiered on Broadway in 1965 and was, as this episode aired, undergoing a revival.