Isn't It Romantic?
Isn't It Romantic? is a 1932 song, written by Lorenz Hart and composed by Richard Rodgers, made popular by the Hollywood musical film Love Me Tonight (1932), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. It has become a standard, covered by Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, the Bill Evans trio, Tony Bennett, and many more.
Frank Zappa
During Frank Zappa's Punky's Whips, Terry Bozzio at one point exclaims: Oh Punky, isn't It romantic?, while the group quotes from the melody of Hart and Rodgers' song of the same name.[1] On the Baby Snakes (The Film) DVD, the theme is also whistled.
During a 1977 concert in the London UK Hammersmith Odeon, Zappa quoted from Isn't It Romantic? during a performance of City Of Tiny Lites, Black Napkins and Muffin Man.
Quotes
Den Simms: "I'll tell ya how one of these came about for me recently, and that was I was watching a Woody Allen movie on TV, and in the soundtrack of that was a jazz standard which I heard and thought to myself, "That, that's part of 'Punky's Whips"'. And I went, "What is this? What is this?" And I thought, "Well, I'll wait until the end of the movie, the credits will whiz by, and I'll be able to pluck it out." Credits whiz by and there's all these thousands of songs on it. Well, OK maybe I'll see a tape of the movie on a VCR one day, I'll be able to stop it and see what the song was."
Frank Zappa: "So you wanna know what the song was?"
Den Simms: "I found out what it was about a week later when I saw an American Express commercial on TV. They had somebody singing "Isn't It Romantic?"
Frank Zappa: "Yeah!"
Den Simms: "I went, pulled out the fake book and there it is, y'know. (FZ laughs) That's the kind of stuff that I'm convinced that your music will eternally challenge me with those kinds of things, and always keep me interested."
- They're Doing the Interview of the Century, Part 1, by Den Simms, Eric Buxton, Rob Samler, Society Pages (The Magazine), April 1990.
