This Groundbreaking Comedy Album Has Held Up Perfectly, If You Remember This Candy Commercial from the ’70s

I can’t believe you’ve never heard this album before. Dal Snagwood is one of the foundational comedians of the 1970s. He was so smart and incisive—almost more like a philosopher. Every comic from the ’90s says that this is the one that inspired them to try it, and those guys are usually right about everything. I’ll put it on right now.

This first track is my favorite. It’s so good. Now, to understand it, it helps to know that Chumpy Chuckers was a candy bar from the ’70s, because he’s going to be talking about them for the next ten minutes or so.

No, they stopped making them sometime around 1982 or 1983, so I don’t think that anyone has ever eaten one in my lifetime. I remember a school teacher sang the jingle once when I was in the third grade, but otherwise, I have never heard of it.

Yeah, I looked Chumpy Chuckers up after I listened to this track for the first time. Oh, hang on, this part is great—he sounds just like the commercial. All that back and forth about, “Why don’t they make a candy bar with peanuts and pretzels?” and the “Gee, Einstein, I don’t know!” Ha ha ha. Oh, but that part when he was cursing and pretending to beat up the cartoon characters from the commercial was all made up. That was, like, his take on it.

I looked up the commercial, too, so I know what it was. Let’s watch it later; I don’t want to slow down his momentum.

Yeah, that commercial must have been on all the time. Do you hear how the audience is laughing hysterically once he makes that slide whistle noise? That’s how the commercial jingle begins. He’s singing the melody exactly, although, in the actual commercial, it’s played with a xylophone, not by hitting his hand on the mic for four minutes.

The real jingle doesn’t have that verse where he calls the consumers “dummies,” though, but it does have that chorus where it lists all the things the candy tastes like. See, but in the real one, they say like “pretzels” and “chocolate,” not “old tires” or “banana peels” or “raw sewage.” But it does end with the part where he sings, “And the cherry is the cherry on top.” And no, the original one doesn’t have the part with the singer rhyming “Chumpy Chuckers” like that. That’s just the genius of Dal’s writing.

No, John Travolta wasn’t actually in the commercial. He’s just doing his voice because it would be funny if Travolta were in the commercial. Yeah, so these other voices he’s doing now are supposed to be from a sitcom from the ’70s that I guess was pretty popular, but I can’t find anything about it online.

I think he must be making a funny face or something here, because the audience just laughs for like forty-five seconds.

All right, so for this next two or three minutes, I don’t know how much of AP US history you remember, but it really helps if you’re familiar with Martha Mitchell and her role during Watergate. I don’t think she actually ever said anything about Chumpy Chuckers on the record, but if she did, it definitely would have sounded like this. We’ll have to look up what her voice sounded like later.

That’s his “hippie” voice. He does it in many other bits, too, but I think it works best here because it underlines his biggest theme on the album: “What if the cartoon bear from the Chumpy Chuckers commercial were a hippie?”

I’ll admit that there’s a lot of really good comedy out there today, but I think you’ll have to agree that no one is doing material like this anymore. It really is a shame.

All right, so that’s the first track. Kind of puts you in the mood for some Chumpy Chuckers, right? Ha ha.

Hey, before we listen to the next one, would you do me a favor? Can you tell me how my slide whistle noise sounds?