That's why we invited you

November 13, 2016 9:55 AM

Trying to track down a song or its origin. Whenever someone was acting like or mentioned the words "party pooper," my Dad would pipe in with the lyrics "Every party needs a pooper / that's why we invited you... Party Pooper!" I'm trying to find out where it comes from and what the official version was. Googling turned up this awesome woman singing it, as well as a clip from Father of The Bride II, but I know it's much older than that. Is it a whole song? Or was it in a film? A radio comedy?
posted by Mchelly to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

I think it's a parody of the the old song Pretty Baby.. "Everybody loves a baby that's why I'm in love with you, pretty baby"
posted by pintapicasso at 10:10 AM on November 13, 2016

Google suggests that it's a riff on the song Pretty Baby which was originally released in 1916 but covered a bunch of times by popular artists in subsequent decades.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:12 AM on November 13, 2016

I was a young child in the 60s and this song was already a "standard" that kids sang all the time. I found some lyrics online but they include the word, camcorder, so they aren't original.
posted by Altomentis at 10:36 AM on November 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

We sang this at camp. It was always a stub of a song.
posted by politikitty at 11:55 AM on November 13, 2016

Response by poster: There must be a source, though, right? If it was disseminated so widely, someone must have sung it on the radio or TV or in a film? How would word of mouth work on a song meme back before we called them memes? It seems too specific to have grown spontaneously in more than one location.
posted by Mchelly at 12:16 PM on November 13, 2016

I don't think there has to be a single source in the sense you mean it; folklore like that is distributed peer-to-peer, if you will, rather than one-to-many. See The Burning of the School for another example.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:19 PM on November 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

How would word of mouth work on a song meme back before we called them memes?

This is how all random playground knowledge has worked from the beginning of time. I was working at a summer camp a few years ago and I overheard the middle of a conversation between two 12 year old boys one day. It took exactly three words before I knew that the one was telling the other a dirty joke that I myself had heard on the playground over 20 years ago.

I had to tell them off for being inappropriate, and they looked at me in astonishment that I even knew what they were saying on the basis of three words that were not even dirty in and of themselves ("On blueberry hill"). Every generation thinks they made it up themselves.
posted by chainsofreedom at 5:06 AM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]