And when you finished doing that, you brought in the dog and put out the cat, yackety yack!
The lyrics describe the listing of household chores to a kid, presumably a teenager, the teenager's response (yakety yak) and the parent's retort (don't talk back), an experience very familiar to a white teenager of the day. Leiber has said the Coasters’ portrayed “a white kid’s view of a black person’s conception of white society.”
I don't know if the joke's on me or somebody else, but I sure didn't relate this situation to myself, as much as I might RELATE to it, you know. They were black guys singing, and it seemed to me that they were singing about themselves.
Also, BTW, I always thought that "yakety yak" was in summary of the parental or otherwise authoritarian instructions ( maybe from bossy wives, which is what I assumed ) and that "don't talk back" was in addendum. That still makes sense to me, since the narrator would hardly be inclined to characterize his own unspecified responses in this way. I can certainly RELATE this far.