Day 25 - A Song that Makes You Laugh

This entry a part of the 30 Day Song Challenge

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The Sweater
Meryn Cadell
Angel Food for Thought
(Released April 1992)

Such a hilarious hit this is! I remember how my org mates and I were left in stitches playing this song on repeat at the then non-operational DZLB booth, our hangout.

Being that it’s spoken word, the song is pretty literal. It tells of a teenage girl’s infatuation with a boy (presumably a jock), who has lent her his sweater on a school camping trip. She waxes rhapsodic about this sweater, from what it should look like, where to hide it, how it should be worn, and what material it’s made of. She then puts it on Monday the next school week, hoping it would communicate that “this is the sweater belonging to a boy and the boy is a genuine hunka-hunka burning love and is not just some hand-me-down from your brother or father.” Unfortunately, she realizes that she was caught up in her delusions and ends up “tearing the stinking sweater from her body” when the boy asks for the sweater back, thinking he’d accidentally left it in the tent during the camping trip.

Oh why am I bothering to retell the story. You best listen for yourself to get the joke!

The song makes me laugh on two levels. First, the song in itself is funny. The way Meryn psychoanalyzed an average teenage girl and put it into such truthful and witty words is hilarious. In fact, the song reminds me of a high school classmate, whom we all thought was delusional for thinking that popular boy would ask her to the prom. She wasn’t necessarily a nobody, just not one of them popular girls.

Second, what’s ironic about this song about a teenage girl’s infatuation with a boy is that Meryn Cadell is now a transexual man.

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