The Greensleeves Monologue Annotated

"The most erudite segment of the long-running 1950s two-man show "At the Drop of a Hat" was a fanciful monologue about the origin of the tune Greensleeves by Michael Flanders. This page is an annotated transcript.

Explaining jokes is the surest way of killing them, I hear you say. Well, certainly -- and I'm quite sure very few readers of this page need "tight as Andronicus" or "Angry Young Man" explained. But considering that this extremely witty monologue was intended to appeal to a culturally savvy audience of London theatregoers in the 1950s, it would hardly be surprising if a few of the puns and sly references were lost on an audience in the 21st century. Some of them are so clever that they deserve resurrection, or at least preservation in some sort of cultural formaldehyde.

Here, then, is the "Greensleeves" monlogue explained to death, in an amalgam of the version recorded for vinyl in 1957 and that recorded for CD at the last performance at the Fortune Theatre, May 2, 1959."

http://www.beachmedia.com/gorbuduc.html