‘Very funny, I don’t think,’ said my husband when I mentioned Harry Tate, although Tate died in 1940 and even my husband wasn’t going to the music hall then. But one of Tate’s catchphrases, How’s your father, has just been put into the Oxford English Dictionary.
What does it mean? Many people nowadays will answer ‘rumpy-pumpy’ or some such low euphemism. When Tate popularised it, in 1915 or before, it was just a piece of nonsense to make his act more absurd, like Tiddy Doll the gingerbread seller drumming up trade 100 years earlier: ‘Mary, Mary, where are you now, Mary? I live, when at home, at the second house in Little Ball-street, two steps under ground, with a wiscum, riscum, and a why-not….’
Tate had a song in which the chorus went: ‘How’s your father? All right?’ My husband tells me of vulgar supplementary lines: ‘How’s your mother? Half tight.
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