Abby Sales' post of Sam Hinton's comments sound pretty accurate as far as they go. The story of the multiple encounters with a barrel of bricks has been around for a very long time, and I suspect it may have been old when the pyramids were being built.

I first encountered it in 1950 when an organization I belonged to put on a group of skits. This scenario was one of them. I played the part of the unfortunate victim of his own lack of foresight. The scene was a courtroom and I was suing the contractor for getting me into the situation in the first place. They wrapped my up like a mummy and carried me in on a stretcher, and I delivered my lines while lying on my back on the floor. I got most of the laughs as I described the sequence of events as they got worse and worse.

A friend of mine named Ansel Butterfield found the skit and put it together. He got it from a book entitled The Desert Island Decameron, published 1945, a collection of funny stories (short pieces by Ring Lardner, Mark Twain, etc.), humorous monologs, gags, that sort of thing, compiled by H. Allen Smith. Marvelous book. (In fact, this thread prompted me to look it up on bookfinders.com, and it seems there are plenty of used copies around. I ordered one.) The book said it was a script from the old Fred Allen Show that ran on the radio during the Thirties and Forties (background of the Fred Allen Show and a typical "Allen's Alley" script). And I'm pretty sure that Fred Allen got it from a prior source.

The first time I heard it as a song (to the tune of I Met Her in the Garden Where the Praties Grow) was in the late Seventies at one of the many parties that accompanied the Northwest Folklife Festival. One of the singers from Vancouver, B.C. sang it. Once I heard it sung, it was obvious that it was great song material. I promptly learned it.

I wonder if anyone can trace it back to a source before the Fred Allen Show.

Don Firth