I was watching an old SNL (the one they show at 3am after the new show) and it was from the mid 80’s. The sketch was “Jackie Rogers, Jr., $100,000 Jackpot Wad” - a Password-based game show.
You had Billy Crystal as Sammy Davis, Jr. and Gary Kroeger as some foreign weirdo who wasn’t very bright.
Billy is giving clues to Gary who just isn’t getting it. Here’s the joke I didn’t get:
The clue is “Chocolate babies”:
Billy: This is…
Gary: chocolate babies?
Billy: Right.
Actually, I think it was Christopher Guest as Rajeev Vindaloo, if I remember the name correctly.
I thought the joke was just that he was doing so poorly, as with the clues for “bagel” which any idiot could have gotten (“Okay, you’re at the ocean and you see a lot of birds, they’re called sea…” “Sea birds.”), and then he just plain guessed “chocolate babies” correctly out of the blue. It was funny as hell the first time I saw it, back in the 80s.
I remember seeing this skit and the whole “chocolate babies” thing. The joke was that they couldn’t get the simplest things, yet some esoteric phrase that has probably not been uttered very often, if ever, was something they were able to get without even giving any clues. It didn’t have to be “chocolate babies.” It could have been any other non-sequitur-like phrase that would not have made any normal sense. At least that’s how I figured it when I originally saw it.
I’m going out on a limb here, because I haven’t seen the skit in question, but for what it’s worth, “chocolate babies” are actual candy, and were once commonly called “offensive word for black people babies.” We’re talking old-fashioned penny candy here. I’m wondering if this is more of a Sammy Davis joke. I’m about 99% sure there is an actual Rat Pack sketch that brings up chocolate babies, in reference to him being short. Sorta like the one where someone (Dean, I think) picks him up and makes reference to accepting an award statuette.
Actually, it was a self-referential joke by Crystal and Guest, which is why the audience responded to it with such enthusiasm. You may remember they had another popular pair of characters from that season, the two security guards who could uncannily finish each other’s statements.
Crystal: So I grabbed one of those…
Guest: Meat thermometers?
Crystal: Yeah. And I plunged it right into my ear, y’know?
Guest: Uh huh.
Crystal: Then I took one of them…
Guest: Ballpeen hammers?
Crystal: Right. And I just started bangin’ on it, and I shoved it up there as far as it could go…
Guest: That’s some pain, boy…
Crystal: I Know, I Hate It When That Happens*.
*became one of Crystal’s vaudeville-schtick phrases
First, I always assumed that the joke was funny for both the reasons Max Torque and Moody Bastard said (btw, Moody, my favorite was always the one with the linoleum knife and the lemon juice!).
But what struck me so funny about this thread is that this weekend I was playing Taboo with my family. One of my cousins was struggling with a word, and just kept saying “This is … this is …” and losing it. All I wanted to do was shout “chocolate babies!”, but I knew nobody else at the table would get it.
It’s hard being the only one who knows something funny.
And as one more funny game show parody, I remember a sketch by the Higgins Boys and Gruber that was also a takeoff of Pyramid, where the cluegiver was saying vague stuff like “Main …” and “Elm …” and the contestant just shouts “Streets of Reykjavik, Iceland!!” To this day, that still makes me giggle.
Crystal: “Then I took one of them… one of them…”
Guest: “Fish hooks?”
Crystal: “Yeah! And I stick it through my bottom lip! Then I took one of them… one of them…”
Guest: “Sixteen-pound shotputs you had lying around the rumpus room?”
But back to the OP… I always thought it was funny because he blurted out the correct obscure answer without even a hint, following the infuriatingly long hints for “seagull” and “bagel”. “Sea”… '“Bird”…
But better, from the same skit:
Answer = Asparagus
Sammy Davis Jr.: “Okay, it’s about this long. It’s a shaft with a tip on it.”
Vindaloo: raises eyebrow, smarmy smirk at Sammy
Sammy (horrified): “PASS!”
This is totally cracking me up. From Walloon’s link, the description of the candies reads,
“Chocolate Babies… small chocolate shaped babies about one inch long.”
Emphasis mine. I wonder what a chocolate-shaped baby looks like? A bar or a chip?
My favorite (though somewhat dated reference) has always been:
“Then I took one of those…”
“Six inch replicas of the Empire State Building?”
“Right, that’s it! And I stuck it into my nose, and it came out my forehead, and I looked like…”
“The Amazing Real Unicorn at the Ringling Brothers Branum and Bailey Circus?”
The way he quoted that line straight out of the circus advertisements worked so well in that skit.
