So There

A few years ago, I wrote:

In Louis Menand's New Yorker review of Thomas Pynchon's latest, Against The Day, he notes "Bravura Pynchonian paragraphs sometimes seem to be setups for goofy Pynchonian jokes."
Here's the example he gives. After a lengthy, learned paragraph by Pynchon on how mayonnaise swept through cafe culture, we get this:

...mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion passing as something else, dominated every corner. “How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?” she inquired. He shrugged. “Maybe up to the part that goes ‘Aux armes, citoyens’—”

That's a "Pynchonian joke"? Confusing "mayonnaise" with "Marseillaise" is a Vaudeville wheeze that goes back at least a 100 years. (When the Marx Brothers did this gag in their Napoleon routine, Groucho replied "then the army must be dressing.")

I was afraid not everyone believed me, so if you had any doubt, let me quote from Alexander Woollcott's review of the Marx Brothers' I'll Say She Is:

The speaking is mostly attended to by [Groucho Marx,] a crafty comedian with a rather fresher and more whimsical assortment of quips than is the lot of most refugees from vaudeville. To be sure, he is not above having Napoleon request the band to strike up "The Mayonnaise." But then, it was in a music hall in Omaha in 1904 that a French scene was last played without some one referring to that inspiring anthem "The Mayonnaise." And, after all, the oldest Marx's vein is more fairly typified by faithless Josephine that she was as true as a $3 cornet.