“Order in the court, the monkey wants to speak, the first one to speak is a monkey for a week!” This children’s rhyme appears in print in the 1950s, and Israel Kaplan mentions it in When I Was a Boy in Brooklyn, his take on growing up in New York in the 20s and 30s. Many of his rhymes were less tame. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Monkey for a Week”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Patty from Plano.
Great to have you on the show, Patty. What’s on your mind?
Well, I was talking to my brother and we had kind of a moment of, where did this come from?
And we recalled when we were small kids, there was this little rhyme that my grandmother used to shout up the attic steps to us when we stayed at her house.
And she wanted us all to hush and go to sleep.
And we wondered where this rhyme came from.
Here’s the rhyme. It was something like, order in the court, the monkey wants to speak.
The first one to speak was a monkey for a week.
Order in the court, the monkey wants to speak.
The first one to speak was a monkey for a week?
Yeah, is a monkey for a week, right.
So you’re at grandma’s house up in the attic doing shenanigans instead of going to sleep, and she shouts this up the stairs at you.
Pretty much, yeah.
And then there would be, you know, an awful lot of giggling and holding your voice and not saying anything.
And then, of course, the major accusations of who was the monkey.
Right, right.
Nobody wanted to be the monkey.
Yeah, but somebody inevitably was.
Always.
Well, I never heard that one, but yeah, oh, I remember.
My father tended to shout things that were much more, how shall I say, blue up the stairs at us.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Well, not, you know.
And did they work?
Never.
Yeah, right.
I mean, that’s the thing, right?
She gives you an ultimatum like that, or he does.
How long did it work, Patty?
Oh, you know, in kid time, probably 30 seconds.
Yeah, right.
Which felt like forever.
Yeah, pretty much.
So, order in the court.
The monkey wants to speak.
The first one to speak was a monkey for a week.
This is a great piece of children’s folklore, and it’s got a good history.
We know that it dates to at least the 1950s in the U.S., in England, in Scotland.
And it shows up again and again in some respected literature.
You can find it in a 1953 book written by Saul Bellow.
And also, it shows up in a really interesting recording made of a man known as Babe Kaplan, or Israel Kaplan was his first real given name, but they called him Babe.
And it was published in 1961, and it’s called When I Was a Boy in Brooklyn.
And the whole thing is just filled with profane jargon and language and rhymes from the schoolyard.
Just total kid stuff that he was remembering from when he was a boy in New York City in the 20s and the 30s.
But what’s really interesting is how many versions we find of this popping up.
Here’s one. This is a longer one.
Silence in the courtroom. The monkey wants to speak.
Whoever speaks now is the monkey for a week.
The monkey is in the courtroom eating a bowl of beans while Martha is on the toilet sinking submarines.
Now wait a minute.
Well, you can put any name where Martha is there.
But the version you found was with Martha?
Well, no, I added the Martha.
Sinking submarines.
I don’t want to know what that means.
There’s a ton of these.
Did you all use that one, Patty?
Not that far.
Not that far.
No, nobody accused anyone of submarines.
But it pops up again and again.
And some of the earliest mentions of it make me think that it’s a lot older than the 1950s.
Because the only line that appears is, the monkey wants to speak.
And it’s said in this kind of suggestive, hinted, referential way as if everyone present in this particular work knows the whole larger explanation, the whole larger rhyme.
And that they just need to say the one line in order to make you think of the whole rhyme.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to find with a lot of digging that goes back to the early 1900s or even earlier.
Yeah, it reminds me of last one there’s the rotten egg.
You know, I mean, you just don’t want to be that person, right?
The rotten egg or the monkey.
Patty, so there’s a long history to this, but thank you for sharing this.
Most of us probably haven’t heard that before.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
We were just a little curious.
Of course we knew you would have the answer.
We try.
Thanks, Patty.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
We love those family stories about language.
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