Lyrics The Reluctant Cannibal - Flanders , Swann

Well after that we thought we ought to take you somewhere a little bit warmer
To the tropics, for a song which we call the reluctant cannibal

Seated one day at the tom-tom
I heard a welcome shout from the kitchen
Come and get it
Roast leg of insurance salesman
A chorus of yums ran round the table
Except for Junior, who pushed away his shell
Got up from his log, and said

"I don't want any part of it"
What, why not

I don't eat people (hey?)
I won't eat people (huh?)
I don't eat people
I must be going deaf
Eating people is wrong
It's wrong?

Don't eat people
Have you gone clean out of your mind?
I won't eat people
What's the matter with the lad?
Don't eat people
He keeps on repeating
Eating people is bad

But people have always eaten people
What else is there to eat?
If the Juju had meant us not to eat people
He wouldn't have made us of meat

Don't eat people
Oh no, not again
I won't eat people
All the day long
Don't eat people
He keeps on repeating
Eating people is wrong

Well I, I never heard a more ridiculous idea in all my born days
To think that a son of mine should grow up to be a sissy
Me, chief assistant to the assistant chief
I suppose you realise, son, if this was to get around
We might never get self-Government
I won't eat people

Have you been talking to one of your mothers again?
You're not getting to be one of these cranks
Who think that eating people is cruel, are you?
Seeing the man sitting in the pot and you think he's suffering
Oh, it's not like that at all, why
He's just had an invigourating chase through the forest
He's sitting there in the nice warm water
With all the carrots and dumplings and things

He's thinking, oh, the pleasure and happiness I'm going to give to a heap of people
That man in the pot there, he enjoys it
Eating people is wrong
Look son, son, I admire your sincerity
Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not

But you're young, you're young
When you're young you think you can change the whole world overnight
Even eating people, I know, I've been young myself
Take it from your old dad, you've just got to learnt to take the world as it is
I won't let another man pass my lips
I know why you say don't eat people, because you are a coward, Francis
That's your trouble, yes, a yellow livered coward
You wouldn't mind eating people if you weren't afraid of ending up in the pot yourself
How despicable, if you go on like this you're liable to get me into hot water

I won't eat people (that's enough)
I don't eat people (I don't want to)
Eating people is wrong (communist)

Going around saying, don't eat people
That's the way to make people hate ya
We always have eaten people, always will eat people
You can't change human nature

I won't eat people
I don't eat people
I won't eat people
I don't eat people
Must have been someone he ate
Eating people is out

I give up, I give up, you used to be a regular anthropophagi
If this crazy idealistic idea of yours was to catch on, I just dunno where we would all be
Just about ruin our entire internal economy
Fortunately, I suppose it's, I suppose it's catching on isn't really very likely
Why, you might just as well going around saying don't fight people, for example

Don't fight people, don't fight people
There, imagine, there, you see, all part of the same fantastical impossibility
That's my boy
Ridiculous