[3] His biggest hit was "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", a comic song in which a boy describes his summer camp experiences to the tune of Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours.

[1] Percy was an auto mechanic and race car driver from Birmingham, Alabama who suffered from obesity (he weighed over 350 pounds) and died while attempting a 100-day diet.

He was expelled for breaking into the Sigma Delta Tau sorority house with his girlfriend and future wife, Dolores "Dee" Chackes.

Rather than pay him for the concept, Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions made Sherman the show's producer; Merrill was paid a royalty and withdrew from the project.

"[8] In his autobiography A Gift of Laughter, Sherman writes that he was fired from I've Got a Secret in 1958, the night when guest star Tony Curtis demonstrated childhood street games.

Sherman also produced a short-lived 1954 game show What's Going On?, which was technologically ambitious, with studio guests interacting with multiple live cameras in remote locations.

In 1961, he produced a daytime game show for Al Singer Productions called Your Surprise Package, which aired on CBS with host George Fenneman.

His first minor hit was "Sarah Jackman" (pronounced "Jockman"), a takeoff of "Frère Jacques" in which he and a woman (Christine Nelson) exchange family gossip.

The popularity of "Sarah Jackman" (as well as the album My Son, the Folk Singer) was enhanced after President John F. Kennedy was overheard singing the song in the lobby of the Carlyle hotel.

[13]: 13  By his peak with My Son, the Nut in 1963, however, Sherman had broadened both his subject matter and his choice of parody material and begun to appeal to a larger audience.

However, Sherman had trouble in getting permission to record for profit from some well-known composers and lyricists, who did not tolerate parodies or satires of their melodies and lyrics, including Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Ira Gershwin, Meredith Willson, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, as well as the estates of Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin and Bertolt Brecht, which prevented him from releasing parodies or satires of their songs.

Sherman then wrote his own song parodies of My Fair Lady, which appeared as a bootleg recording in 1964, and were officially released in 2005 on My Son, the Box.

[15] One track from My Son, the Nut, a spoof of summer camp titled "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", became a surprise novelty hit, reaching No.

Two other Sherman singles charted in the lower regions of the Billboard 100: an updated "Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh" (#59 in 1964), and "The Drinking Man's Diet" (#98 in 1965).

Sherman's "The End of a Symphony", spotlighting Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops Orchestra, reached #113 on the "Bubbling Under" chart in 1964, but did not make the Hot 100.

Also in 1964, Sherman narrated his own version of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf in a live concert at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler.

The concert, which was released by RCA Victor Red Seal as the album Peter and the Commissar, also included "Variations on 'How Dry I Am'", with Sherman as conductor, and "The End of a Symphony".

[16] Sherman's later albums grew more pointedly satirical and less light-hearted, skewering protesting students ("The Rebel"), consumer debt ("A Waste of Money", based on "A Taste of Honey"), and the generation gap ("Crazy Downtown" and "Pop Hates the Beatles").

An album of six paper-cup and vending machine related songs, titled Music to Dispense With, was created for the Container Division of the Scott Paper Company for distribution to its vendors and customers.

[18] Sherman also created a group of eight "public education" radio spots for Encron carpet fibers, singing their praises to the tunes of old public-domain songs.

On November 13, 1965, Sherman made a rare primetime television acting appearance in "The Sheriff of Fetterman's Crossing," an episode of Rod Serling's short-lived Western series The Loner (1965–1966).

[21] Sherman played Walton Peterson Tetley, a local schnook who went off to war and rose to regiment cook before returning home a hero, thanks to tall tales and yarn-spinning.

Series star Lloyd Bridges as William Colton, a wandering Union veteran, comes to town and signs on to be Tetley's deputy, discovering quickly his boss' utter incompetence in the office.

In his final years, Sherman's alcoholism and weight gain caused severe deterioration of his health; he later developed diabetes and struggled with lung disease.

[25] He died while entertaining his friends during the night of November 20, 1973, at his home in Los Angeles, California, ten days shy of his 49th birthday.