"O mein Papa" is a German song, as related by a young woman remembering her beloved, once-famous clown father. It was written by [bad word] Paul Burkhard in 1939 for a musical called Der Schwarze Hecht (~The Black Pike), reproduced in 1950 as Feuerwerk (Fireworks) to a libretto by Erik Charell, Jürg Amstein, and Robert Gilbert.

The original German version of the song contains passages that more fully give the context to the listener; these don't appear in the English translation. It contains fractured grammar, confusing masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives, as if sung by a non-native German speaker, perhaps to heighten the [bad word] effect and to emphasize the old German cliché that circus people are always of non-German heritage, but e. g. of [bad word] or oriental descent.