Isegoria

I stumbled across an old wartime Disney cartoon about camouflage, and I noticed that the soldiers kept calling their lizard mentor “old now you see him, now you don’t Jehudi”:

Apparently Who’s Yehoodi? was a popular catchphrase at the time:

The catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” (or “Who’s Yehudi?”) originated when Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin was a guest on the popular radio program The Pepsodent Show hosted by Bob Hope, where sidekick Jerry Colonna, apparently finding the ethnic name inherently funny, repeatedly asked “Who’s Yehudi?” Colonna continued the gag on later shows even though Menuhin himself was not a guest, turning “Yehudi” into a widely understood late 1930s slang reference for a mysteriously absent person. The United States Navy chose the name “Project Yehudi” for an early 1940s precursor to stealth technology, also known as Yehudi lights.

A song with the title and catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” was written in 1940 by Bill Seckler and Matt Dennis. It was covered by Kay Kyser and more famously by Cab Calloway. The final stanza of the song is:

The little man who wasn’t there
Said he heard him on the air
No one seems to know from where
But who’s Yehoodi?

Yehoodi makes an “appearance” in the 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon Hollywood Steps Out, sitting beside Jerry Colonna and watching exotic dancer Sally Rand. Yehoodi is depicted as an invisible man looking through a pair of binoculars. Colonna introduces himself by saying “Guess who?” then indicates his seat mate saying “Yehoodi”. 1942′s Crazy Cruise features the “S.S. Yehudi”, an invisible battleship.

Hollywood Steps Out is a great example of the kind of cartoon we watched as kids back in the day without getting any of the references:

Yehudi lights were a kind of diffused lighting camouflage.

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