The Corner

Re: Death of Larry Adler

When touring in provincial England, Adler used to do the following stunt.

Extremely cheap plastic mouth-organs would be given out free to the

audience. At some point in the show, a shill in the audience would wave his

free gift in the air and call out in a tone of disgust: “You don’t really

expect us to be able to play anything on THIS piece of rubbish, do you?”

Adler would ask for the man to bring his free gift up to the stage, take it

off him, and give a virtuoso rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” (or

some such) on it.

John Derbyshire — Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.
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