‘John and Marsha’: How a 1950s song told an entire romance with just two words
You can get a lot of mileage out of just a handful of words if you know how to wield them well enough, and, using those same few words, you can tell plenty of different stories, as well. Just try stressing each syllable of the sentence, ‘I just couldn’t love you anymore’ and see how many different emotions you can wring out of those six little words.
In 1951, Stan Freberg took this experiment to its extreme, utilising only two words, John and Marsha, and finding out just how many different ways you can wring an emotion out of those two proper nouns. It turns out, it’s really quite a lot.
John! Marsha? John… ‘Marsha’. John. Marsha. John. Marsha. john. marsha. “John”. Marsha.
Freberg was something of a satirist who worked across plenty of different radio-centric jobs in his time, including as a voice actor, an impersonator, a singer of novelty songs and an advertising executive. ‘John and Marsha’, released by Capitol Records, was his first musical foray, but brought plenty of his voice-acting experience into the fold, and is a send-up of the radio soap operas that were popular at the time.
Over a dreamily lilting orchestral backing, Freberg pulls the names John and Marsha every which way to create a soap opera spirit of his own. Listening now, it sounds like something that Jim Carey would have come up with in his 1990s heyday, with Freberg’s voice working as elastically as Carey’s face did in so many films at the end of the millennium.
John? Marsha. John. Marsha!? John. Marsha. John. Marsha. john. marsha. “John”. Marsha.
It really is quite incredible just how much of a story and how much atmosphere Freberg manages to evoke using just those names. He is either breathless, firm, or questioning and pleading. He begs, and he demands, he cajoles, and he carouses. He whispers, and he yells, he loves, and he loses.
Each syllable he utters tells its own story, and each could be its own television episode, plotline or narrative. Similarly, EastEnders has managed to get over 40 years out of cycling through the same old stories, characters and plot points. The writers for that show have always done the same thing that Stan Freberg was doing back in 1951; they’ve just dressed it up with a slightly expanded bank of words.
Following on the success of this single, which unbelievably went to number 21 in the charts, Freberg went on to further parodies, although more often taking aim at fellow songsters rather than repeating the soap joke any further. Some (‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’) were funnier than others (‘Sh-Boom’), but none ever were as inventive, ingenious, ridiculous or effective again as ‘John and Marsha’.
