There’s a word in the opening line of “The Joker” that nobody can define, and Steve Miller has been getting letters about it for decades.
The line just landed on Yardbarker’s list of the 25 greatest opening song lines ever written. It ends like this: “Some people call me Maurice, ’cause I speak of the pompatus of love.”
Pompatus is not a word. Miller made it up, and he made it up by accident.
He Got It Off a 1954 Record, Wrong
Miller heard it on the radio as a teenager. The song was “The Letter,” released in 1954 by a Los Angeles group called The Medallions. Their singer wasn’t singing pompatus. He was singing “puppetutes,” a word he’d invented himself.
“I misunderstood it, so I made up the word pompatus,” Miller said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2019.
He’s never given it a straight definition since. Telling Parade the story in 2023, he said it “sorta sounded like pompous,” and mentioned that lawyers still write in asking him to define it.
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The space cowboy in that opening line is Miller’s own 1969 track “Space Cowboy.” Maurice arrived on 1972’s “Enter Maurice,” where Miller first sang “pompatus,” a year before “The Joker” carried it to No. 1 in January 1974.
The gangster of love isn’t his. That one belongs to Johnny “Guitar” Watson, who cut it in 1957. Miller covered it on 1968’s Sailor and kept the nickname.
The Man Who Invented the Real Word Never Heard the Hit
Vernon Green wrote “The Letter” as a teenager. He had polio as a child and walked with a cane. Puppetutes was his private word for an imagined woman who wouldn’t mind the cane.
He spent decades not knowing what had become of it. Actor Jon Cryer co-wrote and starred in a 1996 film named after the line, The Pompatus of Love, and while promoting it on CBS This Morning he mentioned the old Medallions record. Green was watching. He called Cryer’s publicist.
Green had never heard “The Joker.” Cryer played it to him through the phone.
Green died on Christmas Eve in 2000, at 63. The word he made up as a teenager outlived him on classic rock radio, in a form he never wrote.
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