Creativity Quote by Allan Sherman

Sherman takes one of America’s most tender pop lullabies and spikes it with deli-counter reality. By grafting “cholesterol” onto “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow,” he turns yearning into a punchline: the promised land isn’t Oz, it’s a fantasy where your appetites don’t come with a lab report. The joke works because it’s a tonal hijack. Judy Garland’s original sells pure escape; Sherman keeps the melody’s wistful lift but swaps in a word that clunks, medical and unromantic. That friction is the engine. You laugh because the rhyme is wrong for the emotion, and because it’s too right for the culture.

The intent is affectionate satire, not cruelty. Sherman’s comedy persona often circles Jewish-American foodways and mid-century domestic life, and “cholesterol” signals a very specific postwar anxiety: abundance as a health problem. In the 1950s and 60s, cholesterol moved from obscure biochemistry to mainstream menace as heart disease became a national obsession and diet advice started sounding like civic duty. Sherman doesn’t lecture; he punctures. He suggests that modern “progress” has turned even pleasure into paperwork.

The subtext is that the American dream has been bureaucratized down to your bloodstream. “Way up tall” exaggerates the distance because it has to: a world without dietary consequence is not just far away, it’s impossible. That’s why the line lands. It’s escapism, then instantly a reality check - sung, crucially, with a grin.