I know I've said most of this before but (happily) Freberg keeps on having birthdays so I want to wish him more. Stan Freberg was and still is a master at doing voices for cartoons, recording hilarious and best-selling satirical records, producing brilliant funny commercials, writing books and articles, and raising the bar as one of the cleverest minds in the world of entertainment. I am far from the only person who writes silly things for a living who counts him as a major inspiration.
I discovered his records via Soupy Sales. I'd watch Soupy every day. Every day, Soupy would have his puppets mime to some comedy record. Many days, it would be a record by Stan Freberg. Soupy shaped my sense of humor a little. Stan shaped it a lot.
He intersected with most of the things I loved as a kid. He was the other voice, the guy who wasn't Mel Blanc in a ton of Warner Brothers cartoons. He and the brilliant Daws Butler were Beany and Cecil and everyone else on Time for Beany. He was involved with the early MAD magazine. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And then there were those records of his, which I played often enough to now have a permanent library of every word of them lodged somewhere in my brain.
Every so often when I'm with him, he challenges me to recite the words from one of them. I have never failed this challenge.
But like I said before, I've said most of this before. So I'll just wish him and his wonderful wife Hunter a Happy Freberg Day and warn you that I'll probably say most of the same things next Freberg Day and the one after that and the one after that…