Songfacts®:

• This humorous ditty tells the story of Otto Titsling (as in "tit-sling"), a German who, according to legend, invented the bra, only to have his designs stolen by a Frenchman named M. de Brassière, who got all the glory and became the namesake of the brassière.
  
  The source of this legend is a spoof book called Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling, written by Wallace Reyburn. In this fictional history, Titsling invented the bra in the 1930s.
  
  Bras, though, have been around since ancient times in various cultures, and there is no clear inventor. Still, Reyburn's story was accepted as fact by many readers and the legend was born.
  
  This wasn't Reyburn's first fake take: In 1969 he published a book called Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper, which explains how Thomas Crapper (1836 - 1910) invented the flush toilet and gave rise to the word "crap." This one was a lot more believable because Thomas Crapper was a real person who did have some toilet-related patents. The story, though, is full of... well, you know. He didn't invent the flush toilet and the word crap had been around for centuries.
• Bette Midler performed "Otto Titsling" in the 1988 movie Beaches, where she's the lead in a cabaret that turns the song into a musical number, complete with the busty opera singer. It's part of the Beaches soundtrack, which sold over 3 million copies in America thanks to Midler's hit "The Wind Beneath My Wings."
• Midler wrote this with the songwriters Charlene Seeger and Jerry Blatt, along with the composer Marc Shaiman, who has a long list of film and TV music credits, including Sister Act and Hairspray.
• Midler sang this on a 1991 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She was one of Carson's favorite entertainers; when he retired the following year, she was his last guest.