That's Amore
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"That's Amore" is a 1952 song by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Jack Brooks. It became a major hit for Dean Martin in 1953.
The song first appeared in the soundtrack of the Martin and Lewis comedy film, The Caddy. In 1953, Martin's record of the song reached #2 on the Billboard charts. The song remains closely identified with Dean Martin; That's Amore was used as the title for a 2001 video retrospective of Martin's career, and Ricci Martin entitled his 2002 biography That's Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin.
The arrangement of the 1953 hit was scored primarily for mandolins. The lyrics affectionately ridicule the Italian-American ethnic stereotype, with lines like "When the moon hits your eye/Like a big-a pizza pie/That's amore", "When the stars seem to shine/Like you've had too much wine/That's amore", and "When the stars make you drool/Just like pasta fazool'/That's amore." Martin did not attempt to deliver the lyrics in an authentic Italian accent, but used the accent of an American trying to mimic Italian pronunciation.
Since the verse starts "In Napoli/where love is king," the setting of the song is Naples, Italy. That is evident in the lyrics (cited, above) that contain what may be called jocularly either the best or the worst rhyme in the history of popular music--that is, the bilingual rhyme of "drool" and "fazool," the Neapolitan dialect word, fasule, for the Italian fagioli--beans.
Interestingly, the song is quite popular even in Naples and the rest of Italy, in general. There are no Italian or Neapolitan lyrics, so Italian performers sing the original English text and, essentially, ridicule an English-language lyric that ridiculed them in the first place.
Spider Robinson's 1993 book, The Callahan Touch, featured many bad puns on the lyrics, such as "When you swim in the sea/And an eel bites your knee/That's a moray", and "A New Zealander man/With a permanent tan/That's a Maori". The popularity of the book led to the creation of such puns becoming a recognized joke form in some circles. An example from the prepress industry: "When a screen hits your eye/With a strange dpi/That's a moire".
On the show Strangers With Candy, the structure of the song was mimicked in a poem entitled "Packing a Musket" ("When they're beggin' you please/To get down on your knees/Near their 'groinage'/'Scusa me,/But you see,/Don't you touch where they pee/Without 'coinage'.")
Canadian folk rock band Spirit of the West also frequently cover the song in concert, with drummer Vince Ditrich taking the lead vocal.
The song usually plays as the opening theme music for Pizza, the Australian comedy series on SBS.
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