| It seems there are three different geographical versions. In his book
"The phrase that launched 1,000 ships", Nigel Rees tends to believe
the "alive and well" began in a natural way, probably after WWII. But
(he writes) the phrase was given a tremendous fillip when the
Belgian-born songwriter and singer Jacques Brel (1929-1978)
made the subject of an Off-broadway musical show called "Jacques Brel
Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris". According to Rees, the show
was an immense success and ran from 1968 to 1972, therefore paving the
way to more and more "alive and well and living...".
By the way, Brel was not living in Paris at the time, but in the
Marquises Islands, and he was not well not all.
References to Argentina could be earlier, since it refers obviously to the
capture of Adolf Eichman in Argentina in 1960. According to the
Israeli commander of the operation, Isser Har'el, Germany asked
Britain to arrest Eichman in British-controlled Yemen, only to be
answered calmly by the Foreign Office that "Eichman was alive and well
and living in Argentina".
There was also persistant rumours that Hitler was alive and well
in Argentina after the WWII. That rumor was based on
the well-known fact that Nazis had taken refuge in Argentina and that
there were a fair number of native Hitler sympathizers there. It was
probably helped along by the practice (common at least in left-wing
circles in America) of referring to Peron's regime as fascist.
The third version is from the seventies. The decade began with a
religious slogan, 'God is not dead . . . He's alive and well and
living in your heart", quickly turned into jokes (Walter Lippman -
"God is not dead. He is alive and appearing twice a week in the
Washington Post", c. 1970); The famous graffiti "God is not dead-but
alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project" appeared
in 1979.
But New York was then already queen of that cliche, courtesy of the
movie from 1975, "Sheila Devine dead and Living in New York".
For the record, In his preface to "His Last Bow" (1917), Conan Doyle
wrote: "The Friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that
he is still alive and well".
source: alt.quotations
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