If You Knew What the Gnu Knew

If You Knew What the Gnu Knew is Willie Keith’s best-known original song and the comic centerpiece of his piano-and-vocal act. Its title turns on the sound of “gnu” and “knew,” while the song itself compares the love-making habits of animals and humans. As the novel returns to the number in both intimate and formal social settings, its changing reception traces Keith’s ability to charm an audience—and the distance between his entertaining life ashore and the military career he is about to enter.

Origin and Comic Style

Keith’s song belongs to a youthful repertoire the narration characterizes as cute rather than witty or tuneful. The distinction matters: the number’s appeal is presented less as evidence of accomplished songwriting than as one element in a deliberately light entertainment act. Its central conceit, the comparison between animal and human courtship, gives the song a suggestive subject while keeping the performance within the comic register of the cocktail lounge.

Keith’s other songs make the act’s method more explicit. They leaned on rhymes such as “plastered” and “bastard,” or “twitches” and “bitches”; at the point where an off-color word would complete the rhyme, he substituted a harmless one that did not. The joke therefore depended not only on the suggested vulgarity but on the audience noticing its absence. The narration reports happy squeals from the lounge crowds, locating the pleasure in a shared recognition of the joke rather than in the polished execution of a lyric. The signature number is identified as the major piece, sung for larger crowds, but the evidence does not give its full lyrics or describe its musical arrangement.

A Signature Performance in Civilian Life

The number helped make Keith popular during a twenty-day round of drinking and parties with Tom Keefer, after Keith had received orders to report to the Caine. He played for officers and women at clubs, bars, and apartments, and the song was requested repeatedly: audiences were rapturous over it, and he had to sing it several times each night. Its recurrence gives the song a practical role in this stretch of the story. It is not merely an item in Keith’s repertoire; it is the piece that listeners especially wanted to hear as he moved through a busy social circuit.

Keith’s performances also extended beyond simply repeating prepared material. He revived his college habit of inventing rhyming couplets from the names of people in the room, singing them to a jazzy refrain. At one party he improvised: “Hirohito trembles when he hears of Keefer, / To calm his nerves he has to light a reefer—” The couplet makes the act responsive to its company, bringing a listener’s name into a topical, teasing rhyme. The novel says the nimble improvisation astonished the audience, particularly the women, who thought his talent bordered on witchcraft. The song and the name-rhymes thus belong to the same performance identity: a combination of familiar comic material and quick invention that makes Keith conspicuous in company.

The Admiral’s Party

The song’s most consequential appearance in the evidence comes at a reception in the handsome home of an admiral on the base. The gathering begins quietly, with guests mindful that they are within an admiral’s earshot. Urged by Keefer, Keith timidly sits at the piano and plays. The admiral responds warmly to the music and praises the young performer’s talent to a captain nearby. Keefer then calls for the signature number, addressing Keith with its abbreviated title, “the Gnu Knew.”

Keith shakes his head, but the admiral asks to hear it. That response changes the social conditions of the performance: what began as a tentative turn at the piano becomes an explicitly requested number, endorsed by the senior figure in the room. The song causes a sensation. The admiral sets down his glass and applauds, the others follow, and he asks Keith’s name before calling him a find. The episode gives the song a result beyond the repeated enjoyment of party audiences: it wins Keith public recognition at a gathering where he had initially approached the piano timidly.

Narrative Function

The song’s recurring appearances connect Keith’s identity as an entertainer to his early experience of naval life. Before he becomes absorbed into shipboard duties, he is known in these scenes through the piano, the comic number, and his ability to turn names into rhymes. Its popularity provides a counterpoint to his dissatisfaction with his assignment: while Keith regards his orders to the Caine as an undeserved disappointment, the parties offer an arena in which his talent is welcomed and rewarded with attention.

The contrast is especially visible at the admiral’s reception. Keith’s performance begins under the pressure of a formal setting, but the familiar song transforms the room into an appreciative audience. The admiral’s approval does not erase the gap between Keith’s entertainment career and naval service; rather, it briefly brings those worlds together, allowing the performer to be recognized within the institution he is entering. The song’s comic premise remains light, but its repeated use makes it a small marker of Keith’s social ease, ambition, and talent for attracting an audience.