Archived Questions Goto Qn. Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! At the start of each episode, Laverne and Shirley are seen skipping down the street, arm in arm, reciting a Yiddish-American hopscotch chant: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Schlemiel! Pfeffer is not only the name of a spice, but also of a dish where the animal's blood is used as a gelling agent for the sauce. I suppose it can be taken many different ways. DrBinger Answer has 93 votes. Currently voted the best answer. It's also analogous to, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
So screw it, let's start a soup company! However, many people are not aware of the origins of this silly, little ditty that Laverne and Shirley sang before every episode. Schlemiel and Schlimazel are two Yiddish terms often used in a comical, but sometimes biting sense of humor. A Schlemiel is an inept clumsy person and a Schlimazel is a very unlucky person. There's a Yiddish saying that translates to a funny way of explaining them both.
A schlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup and a schlimazel is the person it lands on. Hasenpfeffer is actually a German stew and I have no idea why it is part of this ditty except that when it is all put together you cannot help but laugh at how it sounds. If you are feeling a bit nostalgic here is the YouTube Link to the opening theme. Humor has existed since the beginning of mankind, and recent scholarship even places it in one of history's earliest recorded documents, the Old Testament.
For almost all cultures, humor actually springs out of tragedy. It is one of mankind's original coping mechanisms. In fact, the term "Laughter in the trenches" originated out of the despair on both sides during the bloodiest battles of World War I. People just grabbed for it. To this day, everyone I've talked to, they still watch it want it back.
And I'm not just talking about "Laverne and Shirley. The chant you and Penny Marshall sing at the start of "Laverne and Shirley"'s opening credits became so iconic, and was so unique. How did that come to be the show's starting point? That just came about when Garry Marshall [the show's creator, and Penny Marshall's brother] directed all the setups for the show's opening credits. We did something like of them in one day - little things inside the brewery and things like that. He took the crew all over L.
But we ended up on New York St. And Garry said, "Penny, teach Cindy what you used to sing on the way to school," so she did. She'd lock arms with her girlfriends, and they'd sing and count their steps on the way to school. She was trying to teach it to me really fast, saying, "You go up on 'Hossenpfeffer,' and I'll go down, and you go down on 'Incorporated,' and I'll go up," and I just thought, "I don't get it. We're losing light," so we shot it once or twice and we left. And we never thought about it again until it showed up in the opening credits.
One of my favorite episodes was the Fabian show, where Laverne and Shirley are doing all kinds of crazy things to meet Fabian in his hotel room. What was one of your favorite episodes? The one where we were guinea pigs for an experimental lab. We wanted to go a fancy cocktail party, but you have to pay 20 bucks to get in, and we have no idea where we can get the money.
Then Lenny and Squiggy share their own personal goldmine, which is this experimental lab for human guinea pigs that will give you 20 bucks to be part of an experiment all weekend. Laverne gets in the sleep clinic, and I get in the food clinic, and we don't get either for 48 hours.
So we get to the party, but the security guy thinks we're hookers because we're acting so strange - me, trying to get some good, and Laverne just wants to sleep. That just makes me think of the writers who came up with that.
It's such a brilliant set-up. There were many reports of the tension on-set in the show's later year, between you and Penny Marshall, and you've talked about how you left the show not by choice, but because you were pregnant and the producers wouldn't work things out with you. That must have a heartbreaking end. I didn't know my final episode was my final episode, because things just didn't work out during that time. The studio didn't relent.
But I'll tell you - it was so great to go home and start my family. I was enjoying my pregnancy, as sick as I was, and just being able to lie down for a while after all those years of working so hard. If another year had passed when that happened, when I got pregnant, things might have been different, but back in the day, they just didn't know what do with a pregnant woman.
I'd thought they'd just hide me behind grocery bags and furniture. Penny Marshall wrote a blurb for you book, so I presume you're on good terms with her now. Oh, yes. She's one of my dear friends. In fact, she just texted me the other day.
My birthday's on August 22nd, but on August 2nd, she texted me saying, "Happy birthday dear friend. On my way to New York. I miss you. It's the 22nd, not the 2nd!
God, we're getting old!
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