I Get a Kick Out of You is a song composed by Cole Porter, with both music and lyrics by Porter, written for the 1934 Broadway musical Anything Goes. The song was originally intended for an earlier, unproduced 1931 musical called Star Dust before being repurposed for the Ethel Merman vehicle that became one of Porter's signature shows. The lyric catalogs worldly pleasures that fail to thrill the narrator, including champagne, cocaine (in the original text), and airplane flight, contrasting them with the singular excitement of being near a romantic interest. Porter reportedly tailored certain words to suit Merman's powerful vocal delivery. The song's lyrics underwent notable revisions over the years: a reference to Mrs. Lindbergh was changed after the 1932 kidnapping, and the cocaine reference was softened to "perfume from Spain" for the 1936 film adaptation under the Hollywood Production Code. Musically, the melody features long, flowing phrases and half-note triplets that give it a relaxed, swinging quality well suited to jazz interpretation. The song became widely adopted by jazz musicians, with recordings by Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald among the most prominent. Its sturdy harmonic structure and spacious melodic design have made it a durable vehicle for improvisation across vocal and instrumental settings.
