Lyrics A Few Words About the Chinese New Year - Allan Sherman

A Few Words About the Chinese New Year

Now this next song was a big hit comedy song
Before I was born and I took this song and modernized it, I hope
The hero of the song was originally Jewish and I made him Chinese
Which is no small achievement, actually
Uh and the reason I did that was that a couple months ago
In January, I was appearing in San Francisco
And it happened to be during the Chinese New Year
And I learned that to the Chinese people, this is the year 4664
And of course to the Jewish people, this is the year 5726
Which means that for 1062 years
Jewish people have had to do their own laundry
Now this is a very tender, poignant song, actually
It’s beautiful if you want to know
I figure I better tell you it’s beautiful before I start singing it
Because once I start you’ll have no way of knowing that it’s beautiful
This is a song about a man who walks into a tailor
And tells him a very sad story and it goes like this