Our pal Stu Shostak found this on YouTube. It's thirteen minutes of the 1956 Broadway musical The Most Happy Fella as presented that year on Ed Sullivan's show. The Most Happy Fella was a modest hit when it debuted. It ran 676 performances, probably because of its bouncy songs by Frank Loesser (who also penned the book) and a lot of good promotion.
A lot of it was on Ed's show that night — Sunday, October 28, 1956 — and that episode got a whopping tune-in thanks to it also featuring the second appearance of Mr. Elvis Presley. There was also an episode of I Love Lucy that was practically a commercial for The Most Happy Fella…and yes, Lucy and Desi had invested in the musical.
But Most Happy Fella isn't performed much. There was one major attempt to revive it on Broadway in 1979 but it closed in about six weeks, and there've been a few scattered revivals here and there. I've never seen a production of it. A friend of mine who did said it was a lot of great songs, not a lot of great stuff between them.
Here's what may be the best of those great songs as performed by Robert Weede, Jo Sullivan and the Company…