Devir Kahan

The Answer To The Yankee Doodle Problem

// January 17th, 2010 // Comic, Community, Entertainment, Fun

I posed the question yesterday: What exactly did Yankee Doodle refer to when he called something “macaroni”? Well, you guys came up with some great answers and I thought (like I said) I would share a few of them with you in this video.

Here were just a few from various YouTubers (unedited, by the way – they appear as they were posted):

1. “The Macaroni Club consisted of young, wealthy British gentlemen who traveled
   to France and Italy and adopted the ostentatious and flamboyant fashions
   popular in those countries during the eighteenth century. The Macaronis, not members of a true club but rather a new generation of continental society, were often ridiculed by the British establishment.
   The joke was that a colonial—a Yankee “dandy”—would stick a feather in his tricorne or coonskin cap and think himself as fashionable as any man à la mode in Paris or Rome.”
2. “I always thought it was this:
   Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony, stuck a feather in HIS hat and called it macaroni”
3. it’s a type of fashion.
   see Macaroni_(fashion) in wikipedia :) ”The song Yankee Doodle, from the time of the American Revolutionary War, mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni,” the joke being that the Yankees were naive enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni. Whether or not these were alternative lyrics sung in the British army, they were enthusiastically taken up by the Yankees themselves.”

Well thanks to everyone for helping me answer up this ridiculously weird question! If you got any others, send them to me at mail@devirkahan.com.