I'm My Own Grandpa

"I'm My Own Grandpa" (sometimes rendered as "I'm My Own Grandpaw") is a novelty song written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, performed by Lonzo and Oscar in 1947, about a man who, through an unlikely (but legal) combination of marriages, becomes stepfather to his own stepmother. By dropping the "step-" modifiers, he becomes his own grandfather.

In the 1930s, Latham had a group, the Jesters, on network radio; their specialties were bits of spoken humor and novelty songs. While reading a book of Mark Twain anecdotes, he once found a paragraph in which Twain proved it would be possible for a man to become his own grandfather. ("Very Closely Related" appears on page 87 of Wit and Humor of the Age,^[1] which was co-authored by Mark Twain in 1883.) In 1947, Latham and Jaffe expanded the idea into a song, which became a hit for Lonzo and Oscar.