The professional voice-people who were drawn to Radio in its early days (ten years before the Talkies) took a lot of pride in their elocution.
And the demands of the new medium were for perfection. Little wonder, then, that silliness, the antidote to too much control, quickly sprang up in the form of Bad Announcing.
Bloopers are part of this kind of fun. So is doubletalk: obliterating meaning with a string of word-like noises. Which is not exactly the same as babbling.
Doubletalk started appearing in movies and cartoons in the late nineteen-thirties. Jackie Gleason in All Through the Night, 1941:
"I said the karastan on the tagabue is a very serious problem- to say nothing of the lara sang fay!"
Good doubletalk should contain articulated word-like sounds, if not actual words. This is more difficult than muttering gutterals, like Fred Flintstone cursing-- it needs to sound coherent, while remaining gibberish.
That's probably why another rule is, mix it with actual words. The listener should be kept wondering as long as possible, is this person unintelligible or actually scrambled, in an almost Dada kind of way. The illusion of veracity counts a lot with language, whether it's understandable or not.
I've assembled a few examples.
The first is from a 1941 Jack Benny radio program. Notice how Lefty weaves normal words with word-like sounds.
"Fightin' a guy inside a faucet." You have to wonder where that came from. Maybe this dialog is developed from some kind of Deliberate Misperception method (as used in James Thurber's "The Day the Dam Broke", "The Admiral on the Bicycle" and others), where the mis-heard phrase is fed back as dialog, unaltered.
I should probably mention, the words here are no more than my attempt to cast coherence over the whole thing. Who knows if they even had a script?
Although it seems pretty necessary; in a way, it's following the same cognitive mechanics as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, which hijacks the usual verb-adjective-noun structures of language to make what sense it can. There's enough real words in there to mean...something. If you can pull them out.
It's no coincidence that most of our examples are from Warner Brothers cartoons. This is a radio phenomenon, and Warners was closer to Radio than any other studio. All their voice people worked in it, and the cartoons were an incessant source of catch-phrases and general show-biz lingo, as in
our next example, "The Penguin Parade" (1938).
Here's my theory: all three of these examples- the Fighter, the Mouse, and the Penguin- are done by one man. No idea who. I think it was this one guy in radio, who had the routine all worked out- compiling them from more coherent phrases, and writing these things. And going on the radio with them.
There might be at least one more cartoon with the same character. The most obvious way forward would be an examination of Tex Avery's 1930s output at Warners. Maybe more to say on this later.
