The Gnu

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"The Gnu" (sometimes known as "I'm a Gnu" or "The Gnu Song") is a humorous song about a talking gnu by Flanders and Swann.

The song plays on silent letters in words such as "gnu", "know" and "who", and adds initial g's to various other words.

As a prelude, Michael Flanders goes off into a completely irrelevant but very witty monologue about a car — "great big flashy thing, with teeth. Engine at both ends" — that is the bane of his existence since it constantly occupies the one spot in his road where he can comfortably get from wheelchair to car and vice versa. The licence number turns out to be 346 GNU. The song itself then begins, and consists of a brief piano introduction and two quite similar sung verses, each preceded by a verse spoken by Michael Flanders. Donald Swann neither speaks nor sings in this item.

In the first verse, the singer is at the zoo when he meets a man who claims to know all the animals, but misidentifies a gnu as an elk; the gnu corrects him. In the second verse, he has taken furnished lodgings, and wakes up in the night to see a stuffed hunting trophy above his bed; he is trying to decide whether the animal's head could be a bison, an okapi or a hartebeest, when he seems to hear a voice, asserting indignantly that it is a "g-nu, a-g-nother g-nu".

Flanders and Swann first performed and recorded this song in their At The Drop of a Hat show.

[edit] Trivia

Richard Stallman mentions "The Gnu" in connection with the naming of the GNU project in a 2002 interview.^[1]
The song is performed in episode 115 of The Muppet Show (with guest Chris Langham).