"Look at me, I'm doing it," co-songwriter Marc Shaiman says of star Steve Martin's reaction while filming the tongue-twister of a musical number.with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies,, and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books.
A patter song is a classic style of musical theater number, but it wasn't necessarily something that was in Pasek and Paul's more contemporary wheelhouse. "Getting to write something that felt like it was really from a classic musical theater genre and leaning into our musical theater nerd roots was so fun," says Pasek. "We were really aided and abetted by the writers. They set this song up to be dramatically woven throughout the season.
"We had the idea of the Pickwick Triplets, and 'Which one of the Pickwick triplets did it?' was suggested in some of the scripts," says Pasek. "We thought that could be a great hook phrase. Then, you begin to reverse engineer it, and you're basically putting together a crossword puzzle. The way that I would honestly describe it is four people in a room trying to figure out the Sunday crossword together.
From there, it became like building Legos, as Pasek describes it, putting one brick atop another, sometimes reviewing a few and reconstructing. "Some songs are really written to be a big, open, memorable chorus," reflects Paul. "But this one was really lyrically motivated. There's such a rhythm and a melody built into the DNA of the lyric. They came together in a way that wasn't intentional. But it just felt like this is how it should sound.