David Sedaris Sings the Oscar Mayer Theme Song in the Voice of Billie Holiday

I’m going to make your Fri­day, right here, right now. Above, we have a clip of David Sedaris doing a dead-on Bil­lie Hol­i­day impres­sion while singing the famous Oscar May­er theme song. The clip is an out­take from a 1998 episode of This Amer­i­can Life where Sedaris talks about his child­hood fan­ta­sy of singing com­mer­cial jin­gles in Hol­i­day’s voice. You can catch the jin­gles around the 9:00 mark (lis­ten here) … and again at the 17:45 mark. But I’d real­ly encour­age you to lis­ten to the full tale from the very start (6:00). Day made?

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Bil­lie Hol­i­day Sings ‘Strange Fruit’

Bil­lie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day: The Com­plete Film

David Sedaris Reads You a Sto­ry By Miran­da July

Find Sto­ries Read by David Sedaris on our list of 800 Free Audio­Books


by | Permalink | Comments (2) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (2)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Your Majesty says:

    So baloney Blimey hap­py to have found you, love­ly, as my life is full of divorce attor­neys, court appear­ances and pro­tec­tive orders, one can only imag­ine the below base­ment lev­el cur­rent­ly sur­round­ing me life. You are a blast of fresh breath air snd and reminder that life can be good with a bit of humor judi­cious­ly sprin­kled.

  • Leontaras says:

    That clip is so NOT David Sedaris! The only place to hear him is on NPR, This Amer­i­can Life episode 104, 17 min­utes in…

Leave a Reply

Quantcast