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Comedy/sitcom jokes that people won't "get" anymore

J

johnbasalla

My experience, related below in "Explain this joke", leads me to start this thread.

What old jokes from sitcoms and other comedy shows can you come up with that won't be understood today by the majority of viewers? I gave one example in the thread below about not understanding a joke made about Loretta Young's lavish entrances on her main TV show because I never saw her show. Here's another that I actually picked up on during the prime-time run of "ALF". Alf pops up unexpectedly someplace and says to the gaping crowd... "Well, who did you expect? Don Johnson". I knew right away that this joke could have a relatively short "shelf-life" because, down the road, many people might have forgotten about how big Don Johnson was for a while, or they may not have ever heard of him in the first place.

Can you come up with one or two?
 
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show is chock full of these, if you are under 60.....I am 53 and was pretty much raised on TV, so I seem to "get" most of the jokes! :)

cd
 
This is kind of the other side of that coin. I was watching "American Pickers" the other night...Mike and Frank were trying to buy a shirt that had been worn by Bing Crosby in "Road To Morocco", and the producers felt the need to have Mike explain to viewers who Bing Crosby was.
 
Here's one from the silver screen. In a 3 Stooges episode, Curly eats something that makes him grow 10 feet tall. The solution to getting him back down to his original size is for Moe to hit him on the head with a hammer a bunch of times to hammer him down. Just before Moe starts, Curly says... "Beat me daddy, down to the floor". This is a take-off on the then popular song "Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar". I had to explain that to my little nieces years ago.
 
I would say most of the "jokes" on the Golden Girls qualify, in fact they had their fair share of Don Johnson quips. ::)
 
Two come to mind:

On an episode of "The Honeymooners" Ed Norton is describing
the three times a man wants to be alone; the third "is when he's
in the isolation booth on 'The $64,000 Question.'"

There's a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Yosemite Sam, trying to catch
Bugs, keeps banging on a door, hollering "Open the door! Open the door!"
Sam then turns to the audience and says, "You notice I didn't say Richard?"
(The reference is to a 1940s r&b song called "Open the Door, Richard," and
decades later had kids asking their parents, "Who's Richard?".)
 
There's a ton of jokes and caricatures in Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry that I didn't get as a kid and still don't on some things. But that didn't stop me or even my daughter now from enjoying them.
 
anotherguy said:
There's a ton of jokes and caricatures in Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry that I didn't get as a kid and still don't on some things. But that didn't stop me or even my daughter now from enjoying them.
Click to expand...

That's probably one reason why they don't get shown on TV anymore. Today's kids just won't get the topical humor (especially the WW2-era jokes) that was funny in decades past but is irrelevant today. Warner Brothers was far and away the worst at this - maybe only about 20% of their "classic" cartoons (1930-69) would be funny today, without the topical humor. These gags were out of date even when I watched them as a kid, but my parents were able to explain them to me.

I mean, really, how many kids are going to understand cartoons about Hitler, "A Cards," big-band jazz musicians, 1930s radio stars, and the like? Maybe older kids that are beginning to learn some history, but not 6- or 7-year-olds.
 
This was (sort of) spoofed on Saturday Night Live in the late '80s, in a skit about the Tonight show. "Johnny Carson" (portrayed by Dana Carvey) told a joke about Rudy Vallee, to which "Ed McMahon" (Phil Hartman) responded with something about an old joke being "lost" on younger viewers. The gist of the skit was that Carson was aging, and no longer relevant to younger viewers, and that he was losing out to then-upstart Arsenio Hall. But Hall was skewered in that skit, too. This next time around, Hall himself may be that "old" guy. Interesting that Saturday Night Live would do a skit like that (poking fun at another NBC program, no less!) since they, too, have lost relevance over the years.
 
This is why "Laugh-In" isn't seen anymore in syndication...no younguns understand Nixon and hippy jokes.
 
On an episode of "Sanford and Son", Fred makes a remark about how he wishes he had met a lady friend of Lamont years earlier when he had his hair slicked down like Cab Calloway. I was 12 or 13 when I first saw that episode and I had no idea who Cab Calloway was until I saw "The Blues Brothers" in 1980.

Same problem goes for majority of Norman Lear's comedies (All In The Family, Maude, Jefferson, Good Times, etc.), too many topical refernces being made about Nixon, Vietnam, ERA, et al, for most young veiwers to understand what they are talking about.
 
jwk1979 said:
On an episode of "Sanford and Son", Fred makes a remark about how he wishes he had met a lady friend of Lamont years earlier when he had his hair slicked down like Cab Calloway. I was 12 or 13 when I first saw that episode and I had no idea who Cab Calloway was until I saw "The Blues Brothers" in 1980.
Click to expand...

The only reason I knew who he was before that was because of his appearances in Betty Boop cartoons, way back when they still showed black & white cartoons on TV.

Same problem goes for majority of Norman Lear's comedies (All In The Family, Maude, Jefferson, Good Times, etc.), too many topical refernces being made about Nixon, Vietnam, ERA, et al, for most young veiwers to understand what they are talking about.
Click to expand...

Lear's shows, just like Laugh-In, didn't stand the test of time for the same reason as most Warner Brothers cartoons haven't - too tied to their time.
 
A lot of the comedies that focused on black characters or black families in the early to mid 70s, would make references to Rodney Allan Rippy and his Jack In The Box comercials, that where big in Southern California at the time but were forgeign to the rest of the country at the time. How could George Jefferson in New York or JJ Evans in Chicago know about Rodney Allan Rippy when those comercials aired mainly in Southern California?
 
KeithE4 said:
Same problem goes for majority of Norman Lear's comedies (All In The Family, Maude, Jefferson, Good Times, etc.), too many topical refernces being made about Nixon, Vietnam, ERA, et al, for most young veiwers to understand what they are talking about.
Click to expand...

AITF was supposed to be topical and the others you mention all revolved around civil and women's rights which were huge issues at the time.

Lear's shows, just like Laugh-In, didn't stand the test of time for the same reason as most Warner Brothers cartoons haven't - too tied to their time.
Click to expand...

Likewise, Laugh-In - a satire pointing fun (and not so much fun) at Nixon, the Vietnam War and changing social mores.

Warner Brothers/7-Arts/Looney Tunes were also period comedy and most were aimed at adults which is why there are so many references to then-current Hollywood characters. Even children back then would not necessarily have known who Tallulah Bankhead, Jimmy Durante or Al Jolson were. The war years cartoons obviously have a lot of propaganda in them. They were however (IMHO) the best cartoons ever made. Nothing in the past 50 years (excluding the modern CGA) comes close to their animation and musical scores.
 
jwk1979 said:
A lot of the comedies that focused on black characters or black families in the early to mid 70s, would make references to Rodney Allan Rippy and his Jack In The Box comercials, that where big in Southern California at the time but were forgeign to the rest of the country at the time. How could George Jefferson in New York or JJ Evans in Chicago know about Rodney Allan Rippy when those comercials aired mainly in Southern California?
Click to expand...
Yeah, regionalism is an issue, too. Whenever I see something related to Carl's, Jr., I know that that is Hardee's here in the volunteer state. 8)
 
jwk1979 said:
A lot of the comedies that focused on black characters or black families in the early to mid 70s, would make references to Rodney Allan Rippy and his Jack In The Box comercials, that where big in Southern California at the time but were forgeign to the rest of the country at the time. How could George Jefferson in New York or JJ Evans in Chicago know about Rodney Allan Rippy when those comercials aired mainly in Southern California?
Click to expand...

I remember Jack In The Box being in Detroit in the 1970s. they was all closed down (in Detroit) by the mid-late 70s. and across from the "Dixie Square Mall" in Harvey IL, there was a "Jack In The Box".
 
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