"Adelaide's Lament" is a show tune from the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, written by Frank Loesser, which opened at the 46th Street Theatre on November 24, 1950.
It was performed on stage by Vivian Blaine,[1] who later reprised her role as Miss Adelaide in the 1955 film version of the play; in its biography of Blaine, the Encyclopædia Britannica describes her as "best remembered for her showstopping rendition of 'Adelaide's Lament' in both the Broadway and film productions of Guys and Dolls.
In the same retrospective, host Scott Simon observed that "Adelaide's Lament" is "often considered a perfect comic song" and offered a clip of lyricist Fred Ebb's analysis of its appeal: Here's a girl who's got a cold all through the play and she says she has a cold 'cause somebody isn't going to marry her.
And I don't know how you can get much better than that.In his book on Loesser, Thomas L. Riis wrote that "the number is filled with verbal dexterity, alliterative and assonantal rhymes at every possible point, and unexpected pollysyllabic insertions ('psychosomatic' and 'streptococci')."
Riis compared the song's rhythmic pattern with "a blues plaint's emotional honesty.