A Wet Bird Never Flies at Night

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Rachel from San Diego.

Hi, Rachel, welcome.

What can we do for you?

So, my grandfather is from, originally from West Virginia,

And he used to randomly respond with saying,

Wet ducks don’t fly at night.

And no one knows what it means.

And when we would ask him what it meant,

He would just say, think about it.

And he’d primarily give this answer to my dad.

And my dad would ask his mom, you know, what is dad talking about?

And she would just kind of shake her head and say, you know, I have no idea.

You know, good Lord only knows.

And I have no idea.

And I just thought I’d ask.

Okay.

And so he would just throw this randomly into conversation or at a particular point in the conversation?

Sometimes he would just kind of, my dad said he’d walk up to him and go, Kenneth, wet ducks don’t fly.

Fly at night. And my dad would be like, okay. And then other times it would be like my dad would

Ask him a question. And this was, you know, throughout my father’s entire life. He’d ask

Him a question and the response sometimes would be wet ducks don’t fly at night. And so it’s kind

Of this family inside, I wouldn’t say joke, but it’s just kind of, sometimes we just kind of laugh

And go, well, wet dogs don’t fly at night.

He’s probably thinking of the phrase wet birds don’t fly at night

Or wet bird never flies at night,

Which was associated with a comedian back in the 1960s.

There was a guy named Jackie Vernon who would appear on stage in a suit and tie,

And he kind of had this lovable loser schtick.

And, in fact, he’s the guy apparently who popularized the term

You had to be there, the phrase you had to be there. If you, you know, you tell a joke and it’s

Not that funny and you just kind of add you had to be there. He had this one story where he talks

About a seeker of truth who wants to find the meaning of life. And so this guy goes to Tibet

And he climbs this very, very difficult mountain and he gets to the top. And of course, just like

In the cartoons, there’s this guru there at the top of the mountain. And the guy gets there to the

Top and he asks, what’s the secret of life? And the guru responds, a wet bird never flies at night.

And the guy who’s done all this climbing and gone through all of this stuff to get there gets really

Upset with this answer that’s completely useless. And the guru says, you mean wet birds do fly at

Night? Rachel, you had to be there, I guess. I think so. I’m a little confused though, because

My dad was born in 1945, and as it’s been explained to me,

That my grandfather was saying this way before 1960.

Like, it was this ongoing thing when my dad was a little guy.

Really?

It’s possible that joke he was making the rounds.

Certainly Jackie Vernon was doing this joke on stage in the 1950s,

But it didn’t come to national attention until he started to appear

On the Jack Parr show and the Ed Sullivan show.

And he put out an album in 1964 called A Wet Bird Never Flies at Night.

But you can find listings for Jackie Vernon newspapers in the early 1950s.

And I’m sure this was part of it.

He was still doing this joke, by the way, in the 1970s.

So it was part of his standard repertoire.

Okay.

How about that?

I think I’m going to leave it as my granddaddy was sharing the secret of life.

He was the guru.

Beautiful, yeah.

He was the guru.

All right.

Wow, this is great.

Thank you.

Well, we’re glad you called, Rachel.

Thanks so much.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, Jackie Vernon, I mean, some of his humor is really dated,

But it’s worth looking up some of his routines on YouTube.

He used to open for Dean Martin and Judy Garland,

And he was generous in his later life, too.

He hired Bette Midler to open for him back when she was not a household name.

And he also, if you love the celebrity roast they do on TV now,

He used to be a standard at these celebrity roasts in the early 1970s and mid-1970s

And really just got up there and did his routine and didn’t really roast the person being roasted.

But he was great.

And he’s kind of Stephen Wright, if you like his comedy, was kind of the same, kind of modeled on that.

This dry fellow who you don’t expect them to be funny, and yet you find yourself laughing at their self-deprecation.

Yeah, I was thinking of him as sort of the Tig Notaro of his day.

Right.

That same kind of deadpan humor.

And we forgot one other bit of trivia about him.

Please.

He was the voice of?

Oh, Frosty the Snowman in the Rankin Bass Christmas special.

Yeah.

Happy birthday.

It sounds just like him, too.

A wet bird never flies at night.

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