Yankee Doodle III Does Albert Hall

Yankee Doodle went to London just to tell some groaners

American Webmaster Brian Quass is that Yankee Doodle boy

Cheers, mates!







No, please, everyone take their seats. (Oh, this is embarrassing: Sit down, you lot! Jeepers!)







No, seriously, it's great to be here at the Albert Hall. Nay, it's the dream of a lifetime, I assure you. Only imagine: The original Yankee Doodle's great great grandson at the Albert Hall!







If only my "mum" could see me now!







Incidentally my mum WOULD be able to see me now if this rather "rotund" gentleman in the front row would sit down like everybody else! (Come on, sir, please! Down, boy! Down! There: that's better.)







Sorry about that, mum, but you did ask to be in the second row rather than the first.







I'll tell you what, if he pops up again, give him a nice solid rap on the noddle with your umbrella -- er, I mean with your brolly. It will serve him right.







My mum, ladies and gentlemen: Esther P. Doodle III. (Whoo-hoo!)







(All right, mum, you may sit down, too, now. Look at her out there, shaking her clasped hands in the air like she's just won the world featherweight championship. Apparently, she doesn't reflect how mortifying such a spectacle must necessarily be for her poor son up here on stage. Honestly, mum, you told me you were going to behave yourself tonight -- for once, I might add.)







No, seriously, everyone asks me, "Yankee," they say... (they call me "Yankee")... "Yankee, since when are you a stand-up comic? I mean, correct us if we're wrong, but you come from a long line of musical Doodles, not comic Doodles!"







Fair enough. Fair enough.







But, listen, when you're an American in 2006 trying to establish a Britishism page like I am, you need a sense o' humo(u)r, believe me.







See, I don't know how many of you dudes are webmasters out there (you, sir, in the green shirt, perhaps? no? See? there's no telling) but the Internet is funny. The moment you try to do something positive, there's always a tiny but vitriolic community of naysayers who feel compelled (incidentally, we mustn't blame them: it's certainly a psychological condition at bottom) -- a community of naysayers, I say, who feel positively obliged to convince you (you, the positive-thinking webmaster) that your online plans are pointless, and that, in fact, you have nothing to offer anybody (thank you very much), and that, when it comes to that, you wouldn't know (in this case, for instance) a Britishism if it came up and bit you on the nose!







Oops. There goes somebody's cell phone -- I mean their mobile. You, sir, in the front left balcony: Please, answer that. It could be important. The rest of us will be quiet. (Shh, everybody! Somebody's got a potentially important phone call to answer! Now, now: no giggling. He needs quiet to talk!) Ah, good, a camera dude has captured him on the big screen for us.







Oh, isn't that nice? The man refused to take the call after all. Let's put some hands together, please, folks, for the man in the front left balcony. That was a noble sacrifice, sir.

Yorktown, Virginia: Surrender THIS! counter-revolutionary bumper sticker -- perfect 'back atcha' gift for your British friends -- or for that rascally American history buff who has everything but a sense of humour! Wait till he claps his jaundiced eyes on THIS baby!

Now, where was I?







Oh, yes. I was whining about how a few no-doubt unrepresentative but very vocal British nationalist types were getting all up in my face, talkin about, "What do you know about Britishisms anyway? You presumptive little -- Do us all a big favor, homeboy, and put an American sock in it, size 10 or larger! Humph!"







And I'm like, "Dude! I'm just havin fun here." But they don't want to hear it. They're like: "Doodle, my remit is nothing less than to break your spirit, and so help me, that's what I'm a-gonna do!"







Mind you, I'm sure that most Brits on the whole are the very "pineapple" of civility, as old lady Malaprop used to say, but there are sour apples in any sociopolitical bunch. Especially in this case, unfortunately, thanks to the ongoing anti-American zeitgeist. Do you know, I bought a brand-new atlas the other day and it says that America-bashing has just surpassed soccer as Europe's favorite pastime.








Time-traveler update: Fortunately, the world seems a little more amicably disposed towards us Yanks, at least so far in the Obama era. Why, Iranians have even modified their trademark "Death to America" chant to read "Severe Ongoing Trials and Tribulations to America." (Don't worry: They say that the new chant "rolls right off the tongue" when it's translated into Persian." Indeed, we're no longer even the Great Satan, according to many mullahs, but now merely the "Pretty Good Satan."







-- Signed, Time-Travelor Brian Quass in the Space-Time coordinate of 2009 America.








But that's cool. In fact, strangely enough, there's nothing more American than anti-Americanism.







Case in point: A year or so after 9-11, the stateside leftists (after a year of apparently shock-induced silence on their part) finally took umbrage at all the pro-American commiseration that was going on about them. They were like, give them a break, right? Their target in particular seems to have been all those then-proliferating bumper stickers and t-shirts reading "God Bless America."







So what do they do? They come out with a line of t-shirts and bumper stickers reading, "God Bless ALL Nations!"







Which is fine, right? God, indeed, bless all nations: point taken. (A blessing for you, Argentina, and you, Brazil, oh, and you, too, Colombia -- I don't want to miss anyone!)







Still, I couldn't help thinking that if I were "in hospital" with a broken leg, these same "empathizers without frontiers" would send me a card as follows:







"God bless EVERYBODY who has a broken leg."







And I'd be like, um... Why, thank you. (I think.)







It reminds me of the old saying, "Doctors always make the worst patients."







What's that, mum? "Ix-nay on the olitics-pay"? (My mum, ladies and gentlemen: Esther P Doodle III.)







Oh, I see: She's afraid I'm going to put folks "right off" my British-related pages if I start making political jokes, given my moderate (my critics would say conservative) bona fides.







Not to worry, mum: judging by the stony faces that I'm encountering at this particular moment, nobody in this entire Hall considered my recent reflections to be "jokes."







Still, it doesn't half burn my britches: The comedians (even the American ones) can crack wise at the expense of Americans on "Jack Dee," and yet I mustn't say a word in their defen(c)e because then I'd be "getting political." Oh, yes, of course!







But mum has a point: I am like SO off-topic. Besides, my new British pages are all-about transatlantic cooperation, insomuch as I'm soliciting input from our cousins from across the pond -- or I "will do," if they'll promise to stop teasing a fella for making transatlantic overtures. Humph!







All I ask is that you get to know me personally before hating me. Don't hate me on spec, for goodness' sake. My lands, you still don't know what I think about a vast number of hot-button issues! No, give this thing some time. You may be surprised: You may end up hating me for entirely different reasons than you'd imagined. I know some folks, for instance, that bridle at my aesthetic sense, which they consider effete, merely because I prefer baseball over American football, wine coolers over beer, and (this is perhaps the greatest aesthetic sin of all for any non-Italian in our American democracy) I actually like opera. Can you imagine? (See? Some of you are starting to hate me already! I told you!)







Of course, Americans have a foolproof way of discouraging appreciation of such art forms. They merely cite the enthusiast's necessarily incomplete knowledge of the subject matter as a sure sign of pretension (the cardinal sin in the states), thereby shaming the aesthetically ambitious devotee into renouncing their pursuit of such higher pleasures and dragging them back down into the humble pedestrian lifestyle of workaday television viewing which (according to the critic, at least) alone is suitable for the great American unwashed -- i.e., those who are short on cash, connections, and/or credit hours at an Ivy League university.







But seriously, once and for all -- and this is the real point --







Enjoy my occasionally growing British page, yes?







Now, get outta here, ya knuckleheads! (Whoo-hoo!)







Psst! Mum, come up here on stage with me. We'll get the rotund gentleman to take our joint photograph here in Albert Hall. (Only do calm down. You are NOT the next contestant on "The Price is Right," okay? I just want to get a little photograph taken! Sheesh!)